Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2022-06)
Updated 2024-10-18.100% 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 will also omit it for mobile entirely. Strongly inspired by (and thanks to) Simple CSS Loading Spinner.
I will try it out gently on one or two pages at first. I will 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 do not know how throttled the core is, nor if performance or efficiency. So I am 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 am 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 do not think that it is unreasonable to add a name.
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.