Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2022-06)
Updated 2024-02-25.100% URLs with a good page experience, a new synthetic statistic to start the month, and all Dataset items marked explicitly as isAccessibleForFree. Oh, and confusing WebPageTest with very thorough HTML minimisation of ~5%!
2022-06-26: British Spelling
British English spelling checker on my RPi, for HTML files, more or less per old spell -b:
% sudo apt-get install myspell-en-gb % sudo apt-get install hunspell % hunspell -d en_GB -H -l < .note-on-site-technicals-61.html | sort -u | fmt
I was able to brew install hunspell for my Mac, but I had to find and manually install the en_GB-large dictionary, and symlink/alias the .aff and .dic files to en_GB
Now set up for both Mac and RPI at script/spellb.sh.
Throbber
I also finally have a CSS spinner for marking 'live' results. Not too fast so as to avoid wasting CPU time and also to avoid annoying motion-sensitive users. I think that I'll also omit it for mobile entirely. Strongly inspired by (and thanks to) Simple CSS Loading Spinner.
I'll try it out gently on one or two pages at first. I'll also keep it to desktop only, to save mobile bandwidth and CPU. I may then expand its use elsewhere.
Even on desktop this seems CPU intense: ~30% of a core on my MBA M1, though I don't know how throttled the core is, nor if performance or efficiency. So I'm limiting the animation to a little over a minute.
An alternative throbber using SVG with internal animation is also available. Thanks to Azizsoft/Wikimedia for a huge cluestick!
2022-06-25: Dataset.isAccessibleForFree
Having seen it mentioned in Google's guidance, I have added isAccessibleForFree with value true to every EOU Dataset.
2022-06-22: Accessibility
WebPageTest started complaining about accessibility issues on the home page. In particular it seems to be wrong to have links in the summary text of a details object. So I have removed the two that I had, a little crudely for now. I may think of a more elegant update!
The new WPT feature is also warning that A significant portion of HTML content [...] was generated by JavaScript after delivery
, even on pages without any!
Well... It turns out that I'm being gently scolded for thorough minimisation!
So, the short story is our diagnostic runs a simple diff between initial and final HTML size. Your site happens to deliver HTML in a valid, yet minimal state (unquoted attributes, no doctype, etc). The final HTML is larger due to how a browser adds all that back in.
Your diff in this case is insignificant in size, but since the page is very small already, the % change in HTML growth was enough to tip off our test. ...
In this case it looks as if minimisation has reduced page size by about 5%.
2022-06-20: Review.name
Google may suddenly be wanting a name field for all Review (and eg UserReview) items. Even when nested in Product entries.
So, at the risk of being a bit repetitive for now, where no explicit review name is provided in my Product file I am now repeating the product name. Maybe this would be better done as meta to avoid the human visitor seeing the repetition.
This is a relatively simple script change. (Which is why I created the script: to avoid frantic manual page hacking!)
Neither the Rich Results Test nor the schema.org validator are complaining about a missing review.name nor when I add one. I don't think that it's unreasonable to add a name however.
2022-06-11: Synth Stat conexDHW
I finally set up the synthetic statistic that removes the effect of the Thermino heat-battery electricity use from consumption, ie consumption excluding DHW.
2022-06-02: 100% Good Page Experience
Google Search Console (GSC) today tells me that EOU has 100% URLs with a good page experience on mobile, 100% good URLs on desktop.