What I've been reading (week 49, 2022)

Here's a selection of four things that I read or otherwise found interesting last week:

Prerender pages in Chrome for instant page navigations

Chrome has been working on options to bring back full prerendering of future pages that a user is likely to visit, a reboot of previous prerendering approaches. I'm looking forward to seeing tools like instant.page and Quicklink start to support this new technique.

Edit: Quicklink partially supports it, but with issues, and it might not be the best tool for the job. Instant.page's maintainer has shown interest in adding support, and in the meantime a fork or two exists that supports Speculation Rules.

Introducing Mona Sans and Hubot Sans

I like how the intro blog post for these fonts includes performance advice on subsetting, and an example of overriding Arial's font metrics with CSS to act as a fallback font but still minimise layout shift.

Shadow DOM and accessibility: the trouble with ARIA

I've not worked with shadow DOM much at all, but I'm bookmarking this for when I need it in the future.

Page Weight Matters

Re-reading this classic web performance case study. A YouTube engineer made a version of the YT video page that was a tenth of the weight of the regular version. But all the real user monitoring perf data started coming back worse than the regular version…

I also tweet these as I find them (@philw_) and post them on my personal site at https://wolstenhol.me/#reading.

What were your favourites? Was there anything you found useful?

Phil WolstenholmeFollow

I'm a developer particularly focussed on accessibility and frontend web performance. Outside of work I'm interested in science, the environment, bouldering, and bikes.