Let's try something. I know some stuff about web performance, i.e. "making websites faster", i.e. "how to keep someone from stuffing your site full of ad trackers because they were promised the moon". So let's share some of that & see if anyone's interested!

This isn't about Cohost's web performance, I figure there's enough work on that right now that they don't need me on the sidelines watching a work in progress.

Topic 1: Priority Hints!

What are they?

A new attribute that can make something load faster or slower, but in a friendly way. fetchpriority in particular. Chrome-only right now, but Firefox is planning on adopting them as well.

<img src="/images/example.jpg" fetchpriority="high" alt="" />
<iframe src="https://example.com" width="300" height="300" fetchpriority="low"></iframe>

fetch("/api/endpoint.json", { priority: "low" }).then()

Why do they help?

So, websites are huge. Too huge. And they have lots of resources. We love a good CSS meta here, but there's also images. Video. Javascript. Web Assembly. All sorts of things. And if you wait for everything to download in the order you find links to them, it'll take forever. And you can only download so many things at the same time (moreso on mobile).

So browsers have to prioritize. There's an entire 'heuristics engine' that's dedicated to trying to guess what to load when. And there's rules like "if an image would show up on-screen, load that fast because someone's watching!" Which is all well and good... but when do you know that an image is going to be on-screen? After the HTML has been downloaded & turned into a graph, and the CSS has been downloaded & turned into a graph, and the two graphs get combined. This is pretty slow, so images load low-priority until this is figured out.

But if you know an image is going to be on-screen, fetchpriority=high tells the browser to skip right to downloading it. In fact, it doesn't even have to wait for the rest of the HTML to download first!

Why do I care?

If you're an e-commerce site, fast sites sell more things. Or, slow sites drive people away. If you're not, you probably already have the answer of "I don't like slow websites".

But there's a bit more to it than that. Web Performance is a surprisingly small subcommunity, & a lot of the people in it are interested in the social implications of the topic.

Performance is an accessibility issue. If your screen-reader can't parse what's on-screen, you can't read it effectively.

It's an economic issue. Too many developers test their code on Macbook Pros, on fiber internet, connecting to servers hosted within a thousand miles of them. And when they test for mobile they're connecting to an iPhone optimized for single-core throughput. All while the median person using their work is on a $100 Android phone, possibly a continent away from the server, watching their data bill get siphoned away by ads & tracking pixels. It's many things, beyond just "sell more product".

Addendum

So yeah, I'm curious if this is of interest to anybody. I'll happily keep going if there's interest there, it's a really neat space & one I managed to work my way into through odd routes. There's a lot I skipped over as well here, so if it feels lacking I can bring more detail in.

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