4 March, 2019

Cache-Control for Civilians

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Cache-Control for Civilians – CSS Wizardry – CSS Architecture, Web Performance Optimisation, and more, by Harry Roberts (csswizardry.com)

One of the most common and effective ways to manage the caching of your assets is via the Cache-Control HTTP header. This header applies to individual assets, meaning everything on our pages can have a very bespoke and granular cache policy. The amount of control we’re granted makes for very intricate and powerful caching strategies.

A Cache-Control header might look something like this:
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Cache-Control is the header, and each of public and max-age=31536000 are directives. The Cache-Control header can accept one or more directives, and it is these directives, what they really mean, and their optimum use-cases that I want to cover in this post.

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Harry Roberts (CSS Wizardry)

A great reference for configuring your HTTP caching headers.

What Does AJAX Even Stand For?

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…Jesse James Garett of Adaptive Path finally gave this use of Javascript a name. He called it Asynchronous Javascript and XML (thankfully shortened to Ajax). Ajax wasn’t a single method or technology, but a group of principles based on the work being done at Google that described how to handle JavaScript in more demanding web applications. The short version is actually fairly simple. Use XMLHttpRequest to make request to the server, take the XML data returned, and lay it out on the page using JavaScript and semantic HTML.

Ajax took off after that. It underpins major parts of modern web development, and has spawned a number of frameworks and methodologies. The technology itself has been swapped out over time. XML was replaced by JSON, and XMLHttpRequest by fetch. That doesn’t matter though. Ajax showed a lot of developers that the web wasn’t just about documents. The web could be used to build applications. That might seem like a small notion, but trust me when I say, it was momentous.

Jay Hoffmann (The History of The Web)

The History of The Web is great, and you should read it, but this piece is particularly interesting. Ajax and its spiritual successors laid the groundwork for rich Internet applications, shell apps, and the real-time Web, but they also paved the way for a handful of the inevitable practices that went alongside: Javascript-required websites, API-driven web and mobile applications with virtually no HTML content whatsoever… and these things have begun to become problematic for the health of the Web as a whole.

I love Ajax, but it absolutely must be employed as progressive enhancement where possible.

Pac-Man: The Untold Story of How We Really Played The Game

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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Human beings leave physical impressions upon the things they love and use just as much as their do upon the lives of people and the planet they live upon. For every action, there’s a reaction. For every pressure, there’s an affect on mass and volume. And in the impressions left by that combination, particularly if you’re lucky enough to see the sides of a rare, unrestored vintage Pac-Man cabinet, lies the never before told story of how we really played the game.

Until now, I don’t believe anyone has ever written about it.

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Cat DeSpira

Interesting exploration of the history of the cabinets housing Pac-Man, observing the ergonomic impact of the controls on the way that people would hold the side of the machine and, in turn, how that would affect where and how the paint would wear off.

I love that folks care about this stuff.