Rick Viscomi

  • A faster web in 2024

    The web is getting faster. In fact, according to HTTP Archive, more websites than ever before are passing the Core Web Vitals assessment, which looks at three metrics that represent different aspects of page performance: loading speed, interaction responsiveness, and layout stability. Earlier this week, the Chrome team published a retrospective on the Web Vitals…

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  • You probably don’t need http-equiv meta tags

    You probably don’t need http-equiv meta tags

    Until recently, I just assumed you could put anything equivalent to an HTTP header in an http-equiv meta tag, and browsers would treat it like the header itself. Maybe you thought the same thing—why wouldn’t you, with a name like that. But as it turns out, there are actually very few standard values that you…

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  • Origin trials and tribulations

    Origin trials are a way for developers to get early access to experimental web platform features. They’re carefully controlled “beta tests” run by browsers to ensure that the feature works and is worth more time on implementation and standardization. Check out Getting started with origin trials to learn more. What’s interesting to me is seeing…

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  • Querying parsed HTML in BigQuery

    A longstanding problem in the HTTP Archive dataset has been extracting insights from blobs of HTML in BigQuery. For example, take the source code of example.com: If you wanted to extract the link text in the last paragraph, you could do something relatively straightforward like this: But in BigQuery, we don’t have the luxury of…

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