seirdy.one/content/posts/website-best-practices.md

date	outputs	tags	title
2020-11-23T12:21:35-08:00	html gemtext	web rant minimalism	An opinionated list of best practices for textual websites

The following applies to minimal websites that focus primarily on text. It does not apply to websites that have a lot of non-textual content. It also does not apply to websites that focus more on generating revenue or pleasing investors than being good websites.

This is a "living document" that I add to as I receive feedback. See the changelog.

I realize not everybody's going to ditch the Web and switch to Gemini or Gopher today (that'll take, like, a month at the longest). Until that happens, here's a non-exhaustive, highly-opinionated list of best practices for websites that focus primarily on text:

• Final page weight under 50kb without images, and under 200kb with images. Page weight should usually be much smaller; these are upper-bounds for exceptional cases.
• Works in Lynx, w3m, links (both graphics and text mode), Netsurf, and Dillo
• Works with popular article-extractors (e.g. Readability) and HTML-to-Markdown converters. This is a good way to verify that your site uses simple HTML and works with most non-browser article readers (e.g. ebook converters, PDF exports).
• No scripts or interactivity (preferably enforced at the CSP level)
• No cookies
• No animations
• No fonts--local or remote--besides sans-serif and monospace. More on this below.
• No referrers
• No requests after the page finishes loading
• No 3rd-party resources (preferably enforced at the CSP level)
• No lazy loading (more on this below)
• No custom colors OR explicitly set the both foreground and background colors. More on this below.
• A maximum line length for readability
• Server configured to support compression (gzip, optionally zstd as well). It's a free speed boost.
• Supports dark mode via a CSS media feature and/or works with most "dark mode" browser addons. More on this below.
• A good score on Mozilla's HTTP Observatory. A bare minimum would be 50, but it shouldn't be too hard to hit 100.
• Optimized images. More on image optimization below.
• All images labeled with alt-text. The page should make sense without images.
• Maybe HTTP/2. There are some cases in which HTTP/2 can make things slower. Run some tests to find out.

I'd like to re-iterate yet another time that this only applies to websites that primarily focus on text. If graphics, interactivity, etc. are an important part of your website, less (possibly none) of this article applies.

Earlier revisions of this post generated some responses I thought I should address below. Special thanks to the IRC and Lobsters users who gave good feedback!

About fonts

If you really want, you could use serif instead of sans-serif, but serif fonts tend to look worse on low-res monitors. Not every screen's DPI has three digits.

To ship custom fonts is to assert that branding is more important than user choice. That might very well be a reasonable thing to do; branding isn't evil! It isn't usually the case for textual websites, though. Beyond basic layout and optionally supporting dark mode, authors generally shouldn't dictate the presentation of their websites; that is the job of the user agent. Most websites are not important enough to look completely different from the rest of the user's system.

A personal example: I set my preferred fonts in my computer's fontconfig settings. Now every website that uses sans-serif will have my preferred font. Sites with sans-serif blend into the users' systems instead of sticking out.

But most users don't change their fonts...

The "users don't know better and need us to make decisions for them" mindset isn't without merits; however, in my opinion, it's overused. Using system fonts doesn't make your website harder to use, but it does make it smaller and stick out less to the subset of users who care enough about fonts to change them. This argument isn't about making software easier for non-technical users; it's about branding by asserting a personal preference.

Can't users globally override stylesheets instead?

It's not a good idea to require users to automatically override website stylesheets. Doing so would break websites that use fonts such as Font Awesome to display vector icons. We shouldn't have these users constantly battle with websites the same way that many adblocking/script-blocking users (myself included) already do when there's a better option.

That being said, many users do actually override stylesheets. We shouldn't require them to do so, but we should keep our pages from breaking in case they do. Pages following this article's advice will probably work perfectly well in these cases without any extra effort.

But wouldn't that allow a website to fingerprint with fonts?

I don't know much about fingerprinting, except that you can't do font enumeration without JavaScript. Since text-based websites that follow these best-practices don't send requests after the page loads and have no scripts, fingerprinting via font enumeration is a non-issue on those sites.

Other websites can still fingerprint via font enumeration using JavaScript. They don't need to stop at seeing what sans-serif maps to; they can see all the available fonts on a user's system, the user's canvas fingerprint, window dimensions, etc. Some of these can be mitigated with Firefox's privacy.resistFingerprinting setting, but that setting also understandably overrides user font preferences.

Ultimately, surveillance self-defense on the web is an arms race full of trade-offs. If you want both privacy and customizability, the web is not the place to look; try Gemini or Gopher instead.

About lazy loading

For users on slow connections, lazy loading is often frustrating. I think I can speak for some of these users: mobile data near my home has a number of "dead zones" with abysmal download speeds, and my home's Wi-Fi repeater setup occasionally results in packet loss rates above 60% (!!).

Users on poor connections have better things to do than idly wait for pages to load. They might open multiple links in background tabs to wait for them all to load at once, or switch to another window/app and come back when loading finishes. They might also open links while on a good connection before switching to a poor connection; I know that I often open 10-20 links on Wi-Fi before going out for a walk in a mobile-data dead-zone. A Reddit user reading an earlier version of this article described a similar experience riding the train.

Unfortunately, pages with lazy loading don't finish loading off-screen images in the background. To load this content ahead of time, users need to switch to the loading page and slowly scroll to the bottom to ensure that all the important content appears on-screen and starts loading. Website owners shouldn't expect users to have to jump through these ridiculous hoops.

Wouldn't this be solved by combining lazy loading with pre-loading/pre-fetching?

A large number of users with poor connections also have capped data, and would prefer that pages don't decide to predictively load content ahead-of-time for them. Some go so far as to disable this behavior to avoid data overages. Savvy privacy-conscious users also generally disable pre-loading because they don't have reason to trust that linked content doesn't practice dark patterns like tracking without consent.

Users who click a link choose to load a full page. Loading pages that a user hasn't clicked on is making a choice for that user.

Can't users on poor connections disable images?

I have two responses:

1. If an image isn't essential, you shouldn't include it inline.
2. Yes, users could disable images. That's their choice. If your page uses lazy loading, you've effectively (and probably unintentionally) made that choice for a large number of users.

About custom colors

Some users' browsers set default page colors that aren't black-on-white. For instance, Linux users who enable GTK style overrides might default to having white text on a dark background. Websites that explicitly set foreground colors but leave the default background color (or vice-versa) end up being difficult to read. Here's an example:

If you do explicitly set colors, please also include a dark theme using a media query: @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark). For more info, read the relevant docs on MDN

Image optimization

Some image optimization tools I use:

• pngquant (lossy)
• Oxipng (lossless)
• jpegoptim (lossless or lossy)
• cwebp (lossless or lossy)

I put together a quick script to losslessly optimize images using these programs in my dotfile repo.

You also might want to use the HTML <picture> element, using JPEG/PNG as a fallback for more efficient formats such as WebP or AVIF. More info in the MDN docs

Most of my images will probably be screenshots that start as PNGs. My typical flow:

1. Lossy compression with pngquant
2. Losslessly optimize the result with oxipng and its Zopfli backend (slow)
3. Also create a lossless WebP from the lossy PNG, using cwebp
4. Include the resulting WebP in the page, with a fallback to the PNG using a <picture> element.

It might seem odd to create a lossless WebP from a lossy PNG, but I've found that it's the best way to get the smallest possible image at the minimum acceptable quality for screenshots with solid backgrounds.

Other places to check out

The 250kb club gathers websites at or under 250kb, and also rewards websites that have a high ratio of content size to total size.

Also see Motherfucking Website. Motherfucking Website inspired several unofficial sequels that tried to gently improve upon it. My favorite is Best Motherfucking Website.

The WebBS calculator compares a page's size with the size of a PNG screenshot of the full page content, encouraging site owners to minimize the ratio of the two.