


  1. The network is reliable.
  2. Latency is zero.
  3. Bandwidth is infinite.
  4. The network is secure.
  5. Topology doesn’t change.
  6. There is one administrator.
  7. Transport cost is zero.
  8. The network is homogeneous.



What if images don't arrive? A tale of a badly designed lazy loader

If you’re looking for an example of exactly what not to do in terms of front-end performance, I can’t think of a better one than this - they threw away a lot of the performance optimizations browsers give us for free in a bizarre attempt at improving page loading, which ended up doing the opposite:

I was recently conducting some exploratory work for a potential client when I hit upon a pretty severe flaw in a design decision they’d made: They’d built a responsive image lazyloader in JavaScript which, by design, worked by:

  1. immediately applying display: none; to the <body>;
  2. waiting until the very last of the page’s images had arrived;
  3. once they’d arrived, removing the display: none; and gradually fading the page into visibility.

Not only does this strike me as an unusual design decision—setting out to build a lazyloader and then having it intentionally block rendering—there had been no defensive strategy to answer the question: what if something goes wrong with image delivery?

‘Something wrong’ is exactly what happened. Due to an imperfect combination of:

  1. images being completely unoptimised, plus;
  2. a misconfiguration with their image transformation service leading to double downloads for all images;



URI vs. URL: What's the Difference?





<xsd:schema xmlns=""



A URL is a specialization of URI that defines the network location of a specific resource. Unlike a URN, the URL defines how the resource can be obtained. We use URLs every day in the form of, etc. But a URL doesn’t have to be an HTTP URL, it can be, smb://, etc.

The Difference Between Them



1% or 13 million JavaScript requests per month to BuzzFeed time out


More evidence that we don’t fully control our web pages and that a non-zero number of page views don’t execute JavaScript fully or correctly, despite it being enabled.

Says @ianfeather at #AllDayHey — “our monitoring tells us that around 1% of requests for JavaScript on BuzzFeed timeout. That’s around 13 million requests per month.” A reminder if one were needed that we should design for resilience

Network based image loading using the Network Information API in Service Worker

Recently, Chromium improved their implementation of navigator.connection by adding three new attributes: effectiveType, downlink and rtt.

Before that, the available attributes were downLinkMax and type. With these two attributes you couldn’t really tell if the connection was fast or slow. The navigator.connection.type may tell us a user is using WiFi, but this doesn’t say anything about the real connection speed, as they may be using a hot spot and the connection is in fact 2G.

With the addition of effectiveType we are finally able to get the real connection type. There are four different types (slow-2g, 2g, 3g and 4g) and they are described this way by the Web Incubator Community Group:

slow-2g: The network is suited for small transfers only such as text-only pages.
2g: The network is suited for transfers of small images.
3g: The network is suited for transfers of large assets such as high resolution images, audio, and SD video.
4g: The network is suited for HD video, real-time video, etc.

Let’s see how we can improve user experience by delivering images based on available connection speed.

How many people have JavaScript disabled or unavailable?

In 2013, the UK’s Government Digital Service did an experiment to determine how many of their users weren’t receiving JavaScript. You might assume, as I did years ago, that the only two options were either that users would have JavaScript enabled, or have disabled it explicitly via their browser’s settings or an addon. Unfortunately, those aren’t the only two options. The majority of users that don’t receive JavaScript likely don’t do so by choice.

They found that 1.1% of users didn’t execute their JavaScript test. Of those, only 0.2% either explicitly disabled JavaScript or used a browser that didn’t support it. The remaining 0.9% did not indicate they didn’t support JavaScript, but were not executing the test.



  • corporate or local blocking or stripping of JavaScript elements
  • network errors, especially on mobile devices
  • any undoubtedly many more I haven’t even thought about…

The takeaway? Do not assume that everyone has JavaScript, or will have it execute reliably even if they haven’t disabled it.

More Proof We Don't Control Our Web Pages



