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So the idea is that data that you already have, a request that you already have can immediately be loaded, and then anything new in updates can come in secondarily. You can kind of manage that as is required by your application. Does that make sense for service workers? |
**Rachel White:** Yes! |
**Alex Sexton:** Cool. So that's service workers, which is just one part of Progressive Web Apps. I think the key ingredient to why this is a thing with a name -- because the rest is gonna not come as a surprise to many people... The checklist has things like "Serving the site over HTTPS", so you need a good TLS cert..... |
The other thing is that it works on mobile, so it should be a responsive page - that's part of a progressive web app. It's kind of like... Responsive++ is maybe another way of thinking of Progressive Web Apps. It's a responsive web app that works like a mobile app, but also works offline with service workers. |
So it works on mobile devices, and then it also works offline. Maybe not completely offline... You definitely need network connections for a real-time chat, and stuff like that. It's not like native apps don't need a network connection to do networky things... But you at least get an experience, and it can tell you "He... |
**Rachel White:** Cool. |
**Alex Sexton:** \[11:49\] Also, one thing that exists on Android is an "Add To Homescreen" button. You can add metadata to your web app and say "Allow this to be added to the home screen", and then using service workers you can kind of add a web page as a native app, directly to your home screen, and then you can clic... |
That's on their essential checklist... I mean, it's not gonna work on half of the phones in existence for most audiences. That is very good, because it's not that difficult, but again, it's progressive in the sense that not everyone's gonna be able to use that. |
The other things are mostly like it's cross-browser, so it still fits into web, and it's fast on 3G, so you're only loading critical CSS. These are a lot of things that are difficult to measure... "Fast" is subjective, in the sense that every website is slow, and we just don't agree on how extremely slow they are. Then... |
Server rendering gets into the Exemplary area... There's a bunch of things you can add; that way, you can have SEO and good history APIs and all sorts of different things, but I think those are less important for this discussion. |
**Rachel White:** So who does this benefit? If a lot of it wouldn't necessarily be accessible for everyone right now, who would use this? Who would use these practices? |
**Alex Sexton:** That's kind of why the word "progressive" is in there... That specific part isn't accessible to people with iOS devices, but it doesn't actually hurt their experience while they have a network connection. They don't have service workers or "Add To Home Screen", but when they go to the web page, it'll s... |
**Rachel White:** Cool. So the idea is just making it better for everybody, and there's not gonna be a degradation of services for people that might not have access to... |
**Alex Sexton:** Right... And according to the guidelines, it should actually be better than the normal website because it's fast to load over 3G and has good caching principles, even outside of different things. But yeah, I think the key here is that Progressive Web Apps are web apps that are really going hard after a... |
So the idea is it's the best of both worlds, and it doesn't break all the use cases. I think they're actively good... I'm sure some of the "Install to Home Screen" and stuff still has a way to go as far as security stuff; service workers have some security things, but I think it's all absolutely a great direction for t... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So being that the base level here is the service workers, and being that service workers aren't supported in Edge yet, they're not supported in Safari (mobile or desktop), how much of this is Google just kind of pushing this on everybody, and how much of it is beyond that and much more widely support... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[16:15\] Pretty much everyone has intent to ship service workers, so it absolutely benefits you to build a website with service workers to get 40% of the people who use Android, or whatever... Like, that's not nothing; we do things for far fewer people. But as soon as service workers are turned on in ... |
I think everyone agrees that it's still early days, but it'll be a lot longer... If you think the service worker experience is good, I think Safari will implement it much more quickly if there are people actually building stuff with service workers, if that makes sense. So it's kind of push-pull. If no one builds anyth... |
**Rachel White:** Yes! |
**Alex Sexton:** It's like an early adopter situation, in the sense that it's early for Safari and late for Google, but I think for the web, still not a whole lot of people are doing this, but absolutely you should, if you can. |
They also have a tool called the Lighthouse tool that will run over your app and give you your score against all this... So you can search for "Google Web Developer Lighthouse Progressive Web App" and I'm sure it will come up. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I feel like, why couldn't we have just talked about service workers? This seems like we have a lot of extra acronyms and ideas, but most of it seems to be really just about service workers. |
**Alex Sexton:** I'd say it's responsive design + service workers, if that's fair. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay. |
**Alex Sexton:** And responsive design is absolutely available on pretty much every platform. Mobile is the reason for all of this. People have solid desktop connections if they have a desktop, but there are now more phones than desktops. So I think that the fact that these web apps work on mobile -- the full design, n... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. The way that you push around data for poor networks as well, and for offline, is very different. But a lot of those offline use cases seem to be either deprioritized or just not very visible in the Progressive Web App story. It seems like it's just become a shorthand for service workers... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. Someone mentioned on Twitter, Dayton Lowell, that Safari does have "Add to Home Screen." It doesn't do any service worker stuff, it's just a link to a page. It's had that for a long time. |
If you download one of Google's beta browsers or something like that, it actually says "Install Application." There are also things that I've seen demoed - I'm pretty sure they're live - to where if you visit a progressive web app enough times on the internet, Google will helpfully say "Hey, would you like to install t... |
\[19:59\] I think it's a noble goal... I understand people's aversion to acronyms and to naming the same thing different ways, or pushing things that are new or hard or not necessary for everybody... But I don't think this is bad; I think it's net good, and if everyone did it, the web would be better. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** On that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back we're gonna get into timezones. Stick around |
**Break:** \[20:29\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, now we're gonna dive into date and timezones and this really rough corner of JavaScript. I love JavaScript as a language, it's really great in so many ways, and in this way it's really terrible. Anybody who's done JavaScript for a long time or has used another language noticed how bad our Da... |
I don't know how much you all have had to deal with this, or if you have any horror stories that you wanna bring up right now... I'll leave it open for anybody to bring that up if you want. |
**Alex Sexton:** Timezones? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, timezones and dates in general in JavaScript. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I sure have plenty of horror stories that I won't tell, but I think one of my favorite tweets was "I was really excited for us to colonize Mars until I realized how much harder date/time math would get in JavaScript." |
**Rachel White:** Oh my god... |
**Alex Sexton:** Which is very fair. |
**Rachel White:** I think that even though it is something that's hard and everybody complains about it -- if you can hear the children outside yelling, let me know and I'll shut my window and just sweat again. |
**Alex Sexton:** We can, but I don't think it's significant... |
**Rachel White:** \[laughs\] Okay. I think that it's also an interesting aspect of what new programmers try and utilize when they're trying something new. I remember someone got angry about somebody making an npm module that would just do something super simple with a timer, but I think that new programmers just are li... |
**Alex Sexton:** It's a lot easier to understand once you realize that time is a flat circle. |
**Rachel White:** \[laughs\] Oh, god... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright... So beyond that, there's some real complexities in working with date/time and working with timezones. In the mid-2000s I actually worked on calendaring standards at CalConnect, and on like the CalDAV scheduling standards and stuff like that. So I'm very aware of the complexity you're trying... |
\[23:52\] Since really the early 2000s, we've been building these third-party libraries to deal with a lot of this. One of the problems that we continue to run into is that these are some of the largest libraries you have to include. MomentJS is really good, it does a lot of really good stuff, but it's huge, and it's n... |
**Alex Sexton:** Do you want us to agree...? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I want you to say, "Yes, Mikeal, you're right." |
**Alex Sexton:** Okay, agreed. Yes, Mikeal. Seems fine. \[laughter\] Go on. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** A funny story... When I used to work calendaring standards, a lot of different standards bodies were trying to standardize timezones, right? Trying to come up with some kind of a standard, and one of the problems that you continue to run into is that if you think about timezones as this logical thing... |
Every attempt to standardize it failed. Essentially, there was this one guy who's last name was Olson, and he maintained this thing called the Olson database, which was literally like a flat text file that had every timezone adjustment that ever happened. |
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