pwa

Amberley Romo read a ton about PWAs in order to form her own solid understanding.

“Progressive web app” (PWA) is both a general term for a new philosophy toward building websites and a specific term with an established set of three explicit, testable, baseline requirements.

As a general term, the PWA approach is characterized by striving to satisfy the following set of attributes:

1. Responsive
2. Connectivity independent
3. App-like-interactions
4. Fresh
5. Safe
6. Discoverable
7. Re-engageable
8. Installable
9. Linkable

One of the sessions from the Chrome Dev Summit, hosted by Das Surma and Daniel Walmsley. It's not so much about WordPress as it is about CMS powered sites that aren't really "apps", if there is such a thing, and the possibility of turning that site into a Progressive Web AppSite.

I find the CMS + PWA combo interesting because:

• If you aren't stoked about AMP, and let's face it, a lot of people are not stoked about AMP, but do like the idea of a super fast website, a PWA is likely of high interest. Whereas AMP feels like you're making an alternate version of your site, PWAs feel like you're making the website you have much better.
• Some PWA work is generic and easy-ish (use HTTPS) and some PWA is bespoke and hard (make the site work offline). For lack of a better way to explain it, CMS's know about themselves in such a way that they can provide tooling to make PWAs way easier. For example, Jetpack just doing it for you. It's the same kind of thing we saw with responsive images. It's not trivial to handle by hand, but a CMS can just do it for you.

If this topic doesn't trip your trigger, there is a playlist of all the sessions here. Dan Fabulich watched all 10 hours of it and summarizes it as:

Google wants you to build PWAs, reduce JavaScript file size, use Web Components, and configure autofill. They announced only a handful of features around payments, authentication, Android Trusted Web Activities, Chrome Dev Tools, and the Chrome User Experience Report.

The other day I was watching an interview with Ade Oshineye where he discussed his work on the PWA Directory at Google, a showcase of progressive web apps. And it’s pretty neat!

It lists a whole bunch of PWAs out there and you can filter them by Lighthouse metrics – that’s the auditing tool from Google that scores a web app and gives us developers the ability to improve them.

I hadn't considered the fact that if you're fingerprinting your assets (e.g. style.987987090897.css) to take advantage of browser cache, you'll need to update your Service Worker every time you do that. But I guess you've got a build step anyway, so it can be updated in both places:

... we used a NodeJS module called Stacify to automatically create new version numbers in all the places when a file is changed.

Sally Jenkinson:

Progressive Web Apps (sometimes referred to as PWAs, because everything in tech needs an acronym) is the encapsulating term for websites following a certain approach, that meet particular technical criteria. The "app" involvement in the name isn’t an accident – these creations share much of the functionality that you’ll find in native experiences – but really, they're just websites.

It's like if you build a website that is so damn good, you get to have a home screen icon on mobile devices. And good is defined by performance and progressive enhancement.

When you hear people say "I want the web to win" they typically mean "I don't want to lose the web to proprietary app development". PWAs seem like an early step toward making web apps not second-class citizens on mobile devices. Maybe there is a future where native app development is web development.