Twitter Engineering: Implementing pushState for twitter.com

I Used The Web For A Day With JavaScript Turned Off — Smashing Magazine

Following on from Charlie’s experiment last year, Chris Ashton has been assessing which sites rely on JavaScript, and which sites use it in a more defensive, resilient way. Some interesting results in here.

A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Progressive enhancement means more robust experiences, with fewer bugs in production and fewer individual browser quirks, because we’re letting the platform do the job rather than trying to write it all from scratch.

Barry P*********t on Twitter: “To better understand my web experience, and how I can control my privacy online, I’m undertaking a few little ‘experiments’.

Following in Charlie’s footsteps.

A day without Javascript

Charlie conducts an experiment by living without JavaScript for a day.

So how was it? Well, with just a few minutes of sans-javascript life under my belt, my first impression was “Holy shit, things are fast without javascript”. There’s no ads. There’s no video loading at random times. There’s no sudden interrupts by “DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE?” modals.

As you might expect, lots of sites just don’t work, but there are plenty of sites that work just fine—Google search, Amazon, Wikipedia, BBC News, The New York Times. Not bad!

This has made me appreciate the number of large sites that make the effort to build robust sites that work for everybody. But even on those sites that are progressively enhanced, it’s a sad indictment of things that they can be so slow on the multi-core hyperpowerful Mac that I use every day, but immediately become fast when JavaScript is disabled.

Twitter without Hashbangs

Remember when I linked to the story of Twitter’s recent redesign of their mobile site and I said it would be great to see it progressively enhanced up to the desktop version? Well, here’s a case study that does just that.

Dynamic Datalist: Autocomplete from an API :: Aaron Gustafson

Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.