Design & Development
How to use the Canonical tag
August 28, 2018, by James Kielty
What is a canonical tag? A canonical tag is used as a signal to search engines that the nominated version of a URL is the version you want them to index and return in their results. A canonical tag (aka “rel canonical”) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the... Read More
The Generic Sensor API
August 1, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Today’s devices pack in a vast array of sensors that gather data about the device and the world around it. For web applications, access to these sensors has grown over time through the addition to the browser of various sensor APIs such as the Geolocation API, and the DeviceOrientation Events API. Such APIs have been... Read More
PWA Minimus: A minimal PWA checklist
May 29, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Now that Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are supported on all major browsers, and are becoming first-class installable citizens on mobile and desktop platforms alike, and with the launch of Google’s PWA .app domain, we thought it would be useful to outline a PWA checklist to meet the minimum requirements of a PWA. The result is... Read More
Sharing buttons and the Web Share API
May 15, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
We’ve written a bit in the past about the negative impact of sharing buttons on performance. What if there was a better way? Let’s talk about the Web Share API. What is the Web Share API? The Web Share API offers something of an alternative. It’s an API developed by Google to expose the native... Read More
Adding favicons in a multi-browser multi-platform world
March 20, 2018, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Favicons: they used to be so easy. A simple 16×16 pixel favicon.ico bitmap used to do the trick. It was like a punctuation mark at the end of a project; the web developer equivalent of finishing a sentence with an exclamation mark or a full stop. That’s how it used to be. But over the... Read More
