Design & Development
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
Your most frequent visitors don’t benefit from your AMP pages
November 29, 2017, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
With the most common AMP configuration, your most frequent visitors will get a worse experience than drive-by, random visitors. How can this be? Default AMP setup The most common, default, setup for AMP pages is to deploy them alongside your existing non-AMP site. You add a <link rel="amphtml" ...> tag to your existing pages that... Read More
User Agent parsing: how it works and how it can be used
July 20, 2017, by Martin Clancy
The User-Agent is a central piece of web architecture and plays an important role in content negotiation. It was created with the express intention of building the ability to address users making requests with different clients or ‘agents’ differently, depending on capabilities or context. This article will answer many of questions you may have around... Read More
How to choose media query breakpoints to best support all connected devices
June 14, 2017, by Stephen Delaney
Håkon Wium Lie first sketched out media queries in his initial CSS proposal in 1994. Unfortunately, we had to wait another 8 years till it became a recommended W3C standard in June 2012. When browsers started to widely support media queries, we thought that all our problems were solved. We had the solution to the evolving... Read More
