Beyond Tellerrand 2015 – Part 4

What a great couple of days, here are the writeups for the last two talks of the conference.

Modern Progressive Enhancement – Jake Archibald

Jake’s talk started by showing performance problems on a site with custom fonts. It turns out that it was Typography.com blocking loading due to their DRM-style font hack used to protect their intellectual property – or at least make them feel better about it. The solution was to use loadCSS from Filament Group. This is something we’ve been using at Parallax with great results. He went on to show native ways to improve font performance, with things like `font-display: optional` which will show the fallback font on the first load, download the font in the background, then subsequent page loads will have the improved experience.

The main takeaways for me were:

• Ember fastboot.
• Dust.js – stream driven template language.
• Flush Early, Flush Often.
• Inline the basic styles of your site.
• Offline first is just progressive enhancement with the network.
• He wrote an SVG optimiser, it loads the initial screen, then while the user is selecting a file, it can download the rest of the application.

Imagining The Physical Web – Stephanie Rieger

Stephanie explored the impact the Physical Web is going to have. It will change the way we interact with and discover the world around us. Many of the examples she showed were based around a technology called Eddystone-URL mentiond in Scott Jenson’s talk.

Stephanie showed a demo of a McDonalds beacon that shows the popular times graphs from Google which explored how different technologies can be mashed together to make the world more useful. Another example pushed a notification to the phone which allowed people to change tracks in a cafe.

Check out her slides here: