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This my personal site where I note down my thoughts. Enjoy!

Apple and the Digital Markets Act

On the 6th March those companies that have been designated as "gatekeepers" under the European Commission's Digital Market Act (DMA), need to finally comply with it.

The DMA has two intersting effects for web, both affecting Apple. Firstly, it forces Apple to allow alternate application stores to the one owned by Apple. Secondly, it also forces Apple to allow browser engines other than its own WebKit to be installed on iOS devices. Apple, as any cooperation worth its salt does, has taken these rules and interpreted them in the most mean spirited manner possible beyond simply not implementing the new rules at all.

A lot has already noted about Apples implementation of the first effect allowing alternate application stores. This has been largely covered in more business orientated publications due the Core Technology Fee it will charge to all installations not done through Apple's AppStore.

For those of us interested in an open web, one where mobile apps are not needed in order to offer relatively basic functionality, of far more significance is Apple's approach to the second requirement: allow third party browser engines to run on iOS. Apple's implementation in dealing with this is to basically break Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) for those who are in the EU. As much as Apple fears alternative application stores, it fears an open web even more. One in which they have no control over which applications can be run on an iOS device and by control I mean profit from.

Advocating for an open web, means I have signed this open letter to Apple. I encourage you to do the same. For more information on this issue, read this article from Open Web Advocacy as well as this one from Alex Russell. Note that Alex works for Microsoft, so whilst his points are still valid, they might not be fully impartial.

The Commmission's decision is eagerly awaited in March.

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PageSpeed Insights

More for fun than any other reason, I like to keep my site as close to possible to 100 on Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights. For most of the metrics I am in the green, at or close to 100%.

On some pages, normally those with many images, I struggle with "Largest Contentful Paint" (LCP). I am not sure there is much I can do about this as I am dependent on GitHub for how long it takes to load the images. I could try optimising the images further, but they are already resized to 800px and saved in WEBP format. Probably they could be smaller when viewed on mobiles, but I really can't be bothered at the moment with managing different sized versions of the same image. πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

However, I then noticed that my site was nearly always failing on "Cumulative Layout Shift" (CLP), including pages without images. This I found strange because my site uses next to no JavaScript or other trickery, so why should there be a layout shift on pages which are pure text? It turns out the problem is my use of web fonts. Whilst the browser loads the font file, it displays the page in the system's default font. When it then applies the web font a short time later, this will affect the layout of the text, which then shifts. The solution to this problem is to use font-display: optional instead of font-display: swap. This avoids the font swap if the web fonts are not loaded fast enough. It means on the first view, the user might not view the site in my intended font. But by the second view, the font file will have been cached and the web font will kick in.

My CLP went from a quarter of a second to a few hundreds of a second. Magic! πŸ§™β€β™‚οΈ

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