Links #2

A list of articles which have recently grabbed my attention.

Optimising Largest Contentful Paint. The really interesting part of this for me is that pop-ups (aka Facehuggers) which typically prompt you for your email, if big enough, will be considered the LCP. A lot of these are delayed on purpose, but the speed test won’t distinguish that so you are artificially signalling to Google that your page is slow.

Favicons in 2021. The plethora of shortcut icon formats that have been introduced, has tended to make me nope out of providing anything beyond a simple 64x png and cross my fingers. With wide support for SVG things seemed to have calmed down, so this seems like a manageable amount of work to do on new projects.

Putting Ideas into Words. I started this blog as an experiment to see if I could improve my writing, and help me to clarify some of my nebulous ideas and document things that I’ve learnt (so that maybe it will stick better). One of the best side effects is that writing about something forces me to test my assumptions before committing them to the world wide web.

Lou Ottens Interview. A very technical interview from 2013 with the inventor of the compact cassette who passed away in 2021. There’s an interesting parallel to the web world in terms of developing standards and how they are often trumped by popularity. Lou on the Dolby B format: “I was afraid that it would cause a lot of confusion in the market. And I think I was right. But being right is not always good enough. Ray Dolby came to visit me and I gave my arguments, but he went on. Lesson: you cannot stop progress…”

Omnichord OM-27. Not an article, but a fun little experiment by Jake Albaugh that makes use of the Web Audio API. Make the music with your mouse, Biz.