Panel:

Charles Max Wood (DevChat T.V.)

Special Guests: Aaron Gustafson

In this episode, the Chuck talks with Aaron Gustafson who is a web-standards and accessibility advocate working at Microsoft. Aaron and Chuck talk about PWAs and the ins and outs of these progressive web apps. Check out today’s episode to hear more!

Show Topics:

0:36 – Chuck: Our guest is Aaron, say HI!

0:41 – Aaron: Hi! I have been working on the web for 20 plus years. I am working on the Edge team for accessibility among other things. I have done every job that you can do on the web.

1:08 – Chuck: That is one of OUR publications?

1:14 – Aaron: No the communities. I joined the staff as editor in chief for 1.5 year now. It’s a nice side project to do.

1:36 – Chuck: I thought it was a commercial thing.

1:40 – Aaron: No it’s volunteer.

1:52 – Chuck: Talk about your web background?

2:02 – Aaron: I remember the first book I got (title mentioned). My first job on the web (cash) I was the content manager in Florida and this was in 1999. Gel Macs just came out. I relocated from FL to CT and worked for other companies. I got into CSS among other things. It’s been a wild ride and done it all.

3:52 – Chuck: Let’s talk about web standards?

4:05 – Aaron: It depends on the organization and what the spec is and where it originates. It’s interesting to see how HTML developed back in the day.

When standardization started working then everything started to converge.

Everything is a little different now. Some specs come out from companies that...

(Apple, Responsive Images, and Grid are mentioned among other things.)

7:37 – Chuck: We set up to talk about PWAs. Where did PWAs come from?

7:57 – Aaron: Modern web design, best web applications. Being secure. One of the underpinnings came out from Google and they have been supporters of that.

Firefox is working on installation as well.

The Chrome implementation is weird right now, but it becomes an orphaned app. It’s like the old chrome apps where in Windows you can install from the Microsoft store. But the case of Chrome you don’t have to go through the store.

10:14 – Chuck asks a question.

10:24 – Aaron answers.

11:53 – Chuck: What makes it a progressive web app rather than a regular website?

12:05 – Aaron: The definition is running on HTPS and...

Aaron defines the terms that Chuck asks at 11:53.

12:43 – Aaron: Of course you can push forward if it makes sense from the baseline.

12:56 – Chuck: We have an Angular podcast, and we talked about PWAs and nobody had a good definition for it.

13:18 – Aaron.

13:22 – Chuck: What are the pros of having a PWA? Let’s start with the basics first.

13:33 – Aaron: The ability to control how you react to the network. We development is challenging maybe in other areas because of the lack of control and how your code gets to your users. Any special needs that YOU might have.

Aaron goes into detail on this topic.

17:14 – Chuck: Is the service worker the star for PWAs?

17:20 – Aaron: In a way, kind of.

Aaron goes into detail on this topic.

Share 2 is mentioned, too.

19:42 – Chuck: If the service worker intermediates between the browser and the page / Internet would it make sense to have your worker have it load and then load everything else? Cause you have those Web Pack now.

20:14 – Aaron: Some people would consider it but I wouldn’t necessarily. I am not a fan for that. If anything goes wrong then nothing loads. I remember back when...

22:23 – Aaron: That is a lot of overhead.

22:34 – Chuck: I am wondering what is the best practice? How do you decide to pull in a service worker and then move into more complicated issues?

22:53 – Aaron: Progressive Web App where they talk about their evolution about this.

25:17 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! Code: DEVCHAT.

26:25 – Chuck: In order to be a PWA you don’t need to have a push notification.

26:38 – Aaron: I don’t think anyone would want a push notification from me.

27:12 – Chuck: What features do PWAs have?

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