We know that there are some use cases where it makes sense to integrate your existing web experience into your native app, I’m Pete a developer advocate on the web team at Google. Let’s take a look at how you can do this today and what we’re doing to make your web development experience better today, you can do this either using a webview or a custom tab.
Well, each of these has their own benefits. They’re also drawbacks to each with web views. The content runs fullscreen and supports many of the PWA features. It has the ability to use post message to send messages back and forth between the webview and your native code, which makes it possible to invoke certain native functionality that isn’t available on the web. On a flip side, web views our sandbox completely from the user.
They don’t share the same cookie, store or storage and they don’t have access to the users, safe passwords and so on. The other challenge that comes up is that web views may be out of date. Web views on devices running pre, lollipop, aren’t updatable custom tabs also support content in full-screen mode and because they’re powered by the user’s default browser they share cookies, storage, passwords and more.
It’s always up-to-date and supports the full gamut of capabilities required for progressive web apps. But there is that name and address bar across the top. The user knows that they’re looking at web content, which isn’t always what you want. We’ve heard from you that you want an easier way to launch full-screen web content from a native app, but do it using the users preferred browser at the chrome dev summit.
Last year we announced a new type of activity that Android developers can use to embed trusted. First party web content trusted web activities provide a new way to integrate parts of your web experience into your native Android, app they’re powered by custom tabs, which means the content is rendered by the users up-to-date browser instead of an out-of-date webview. It shares the same cookies and storage within the browser.
It has access to AP ice that aren’t available in web views. This isn’t designed as a mechanism to simply wrap your site and dump it in the Play Store. A simple mistake can cause some drastic problems. For example, the user installs your app from the store hops on a plane and launches your app. The user is going to see the dinosaur because the app hasn’t installed the serviceworker yet trusted web activities are designed to make it possible for you to use the investment that you’ve made in your progressive web.
App within your Android, app, similar to chrome, custom, tabs trusted web activities run full screen. Each activity of your app is either completely provided by the web or an Android activity. There’s no way to combine them. For example, you can’t use Android components for navigation and content, rendering via the trusted web activity. Transitions between web and native content are between activities trusted web activities do have some constraints, you can’t just show any content, it must be yours, and you must be able to prove that it’s yours by adding a set of digital asset links, you must include an intent Filter for the opened URL in your Android manifest your app must pass the chrome, PWA install ability, checks which includes being served over HTTPS, registering a serviceworker and including a manifest and very important.
Your app must still meet all of the normal Play Store guidelines. Let’s take a look at what’s involved in adding a trusted web activity to your Android app. There are essentially two steps that we need to complete to embed or progressive web app in our Android app. First, we need to add a set of digital asset links. These links establish a relationship between our web content and the trusted web activity.
By establishing this relationship, our android app can verify that the content is served is ours and meets that first party requirement. Then we can add the activity to our Android app and show our web content and our manifest file. We need to tell it about an asset statement by adding this metadata attribute. Next, we need to update the strings.Xml file and our Android app and tell it about our web content where it lives and give it the permission that it needs oh yeah and all those quotes there.
Sorry they do need to be escaped like that. Now we need to create and deploy the assets link JSON file, using key tool on the certificate that we use to sign our Android app, we’ll get the sha-256 hash so that later Android can verify the certificate and that hash, then, in the asset, links JSON file. Will include that hash, our package name and a few other boilerplate pieces and deploy it to the dot well-known directory.
The file makes it possible for Android to verify the relationship between what’s being served and our Android app. We’ve set up the digital asset links we need now. We can create the activity. There’s a bunch of boilerplate code required to launch the activity that I’ve kind of glossed over here, but we’re working on adding that to the Android support library, so that you won’t have to deal with it in the future.
Once the boiler stuff is complete, you can create the new intent set, the URL and open the web content in your trusted web activity. Today, this is available on android and chrome 68, which is currently chrome, dev and we hope to see it land and stable sometime in q3 of 2018 to learn more check out gqo slash trusted web activities. There’s a great post there with everything you need to know to get started and a sample that you can use to try it yourself.
Your PWA is still a webpage that customers can find in their usual ways. You want to apply reasonable search engine optimization and ensure the page is available to search engines. You can use JavaScript on your pages and Google will index it as long as you follow some best practices. You can use the fetch as Google tool from the Google webmasters site to see how your app looks when crawled discoverability helps get customers to your site.
But how can you measure their behaviors once they get there? That’s where analytics comes in Google Analytics is a service that collects processes and reports, data about an applications, use patterns and performance. Adding Google Analytics to a web application enables the collection of data like visitor traffic, user agent, the user’s location, etc. This data is sent to Google Analytics servers where it’s processed.
The reports are available in the Google Analytics web interface and through a reporting API, Google Analytics is free and highly customisable. Integrating Google Analytics is simple. First, you must create a Google Analytics account. Each account has properties, and these aren’t JavaScript properties, but refer to individual applications or websites. Google Analytics then generates a tracking snippet for each property.
This is a piece of JavaScript that you pasted into your page. It sends data to the Google Analytics back-end. You can also use the analytics library to create custom analytics, such as tracking specific user actions or tracking push notifications. I want to say a bit more about properties. An account has properties that represent individual collections of data. These properties have property, IDs, also called tracking IDs.
That identify them to Google Analytics if an account represents a company. One property in that account might represent the company’s website, while another property might represent the company’s mobile application. If you only have one app, the simplest scenario is to create a single Google Analytics, account and add a single property to that account. This is the key part of the tracking snippet.
The entire snippet needs to be pasted into every page. You want to track at a high level when this script runs. It creates an async script tag that downloads analytics AS the analytics library it defines the GA function called the command queue. It creates a tracker that gathers user data and it sends this data as a pageview hit via HTTP request to Google Analytics. This data is analyzed in stored in your analytics account.
In addition to the data gathered by tracker creation, the page view event allows Google Analytics to infer what pages the user is visiting, how long they are visiting them and in what order for simpler applications. This is the only coding required note. You can replace analytics GS with analytics underscore debug KS for console debugging. Using this version will log detailed messages to the console for each hit, sent it also logs warnings and errors for your tracking code.
The data is sent to Google Analytics backend where it is processed into reports. These reports are available through the Google Analytics dashboard. Here is the audience overview interface. Here you can see general information such as page view, records bounce rate, ratio of new and returning visitors and other statistics. You can also see specific information like a visitor’s language, country, city, browser operating system, service provider, screen resolution and device.
Here we are looking at the user City, it’s also possible to view the analytics information in real time. This interface allows you to see hits as they occur on your site. I encourage you to take some time and explore there’s an extensive set of features in the dashboard. You should explore the standard reports and look at creating your own. Knowing how to use analytics for improving your business or increasing revenue is a skill within itself.
Fortunately, the Google Analytics Academy offers a free set of online courses. Google Analytics supports custom events that allow fine, grained analysis of user behavior. This code uses the G a command Q, which is defined in the tracking snippet. The send command is used to send an analytics event. Values associated with the event are as parameters. These values represent the event, category event, action and event label.
All of these are arbitrary and used to organize events. These custom events allow us to deeply understand user interactions with our site. For example, here we are sending a view more event. This might be used to indicate that the user has viewed an item from our site. The event label tells us that it was a premium product. I mentioned earlier that you might use events to track push notifications.
You can add events to fire when users subscribe or unsubscribe to push notifications as well as when there is an error in a subscription process. This can give you an understanding of how many users are subscribing or unsubscribing to your app here. We send a subscribe event, letting us know that a user has subscribed to our notifications. Let’s talk about what happens when analytics meets service workers, they won’t work without a little help.
That’s because the service worker script runs on its own thread and doesn’t have access to the GA command queue object established by the tracking snippet code on the main thread. It also requires the window object. Service workers must use the measurement protocol API instead of the command Q. This is a simple set of HTTP parameters documented at the Google Analytics site. Here’s an example of recording when the user closes a push notification.
The service worker manages the notification lifecycle, so it receives a notification close event when the event fires, the service worker, sends a hit via post with tracking ID custom event parameters and the required parameters for the API. Remember that we don’t want this service worker to shut down before we complete the post, so we wrap this code in event. Wait until since hits are effectively HTTP requests, they can’t be sent if the user is offline using service worker and indexeddb hits can be stored when users are offline and sent it a later time when they have reconnected.
Fortunately, the SW offline, google analytics and PM package abstracts this process for us to integrate offline analytics, install the package in your project with the npm install command. Then, in the service worker script import, the offline, google analytics import, je and initialize. The google and google analytics object. This adds a fetch event handler to the serviceworker that only listens for requests made to the Google Analytics domain.
The handler attempts to send Google Analytics normally if the network request fails, it will be stored in indexdb. Instead, the stored hits will be resent when online. You can test this behavior by enabling offline mode in developer tools and then triggering Google Analytics hits on your app indexdb will show a list of urls that represent the unsent hit requests. You may need to click the Refresh icon inside the indexdb interface to see them.
If you disable offline mode and refresh the page, you should see that the urls are cleared indicating that they have been sent now. It’s your turn. Go to the analytics API lab in there. You will create an account, add analytics to an app look at the results and make this work in a progressive web, app good luck and have fun if you’re an instructor. This final slide links to more information on analytics.
If you’re a student, these links can be found in your textbook. You may want to use these while you are working on the lab. There are additional slides at the end of this presentation that show the major analytic screens and explain how to get there, use these to deepen your knowledge or create live demonstrations. You
Modern web development involves quite a few tasks, running servers, optimizing images and processing source code. Now these are the kinds of manual tasks that you can automate with: gulp grunt make or other build tools. The world of build tools is constantly changing, but we chose gulp here for its relative longevity and its relative simplicity simply put gulp reads: a file called the gulp file to tell it what to do it then processes your source files, transforms them and writes the results To a build directory, this is a sample golf rjs file, it’s written in JavaScript with a couple of no js’ extensions for loading, other files, the require statements of the top load, the core gulp commands and the gulp interface to uglify.
These are known as gulp plugins and by the way, uglify is a program to compress and minify javascript. Now, gulp files are divided into a series of tasks. A task might run a server minify some code or even delete files. Each task should be one self-contained action. We define a task named uglify j/s and write some JavaScript to implement it. The gulp dots sauce task reads all the J’s files from source J s.
We then pass all those files into the uglify tool using the pipe command. Now the output of each command is ready to pipe into the next, so we use the gulp nest command to write the result into new files under dist J s. Snap formerly gulp is a cross-platform streaming task. Runner that lets developers automate many development tasks at a high level, gulp reads: files as streams and pipes the streams to different tasks.
These tasks are code based and use. Plugins the tasks modify the files building source files into production files to get an idea of what gulp can do check the list of gulp recipes on github gulp is an ode package and the plugins that it uses are also node packages. So you need to install node.Js first, this also installs the node package manager, and you should also enable gulp from the command-line and to do this install the gulp CLI package.
You can then go into your project or create a new one and have NPM install the gulp plugins. You need into your project right, your gulp file, j/s, and you can begin using gulp from the command-line here’s an example of creating a project and installing gulp plugins. The first line creates a new NPM project. This generates a package JSON file that lists your project’s plugins. The following commands install various example plugins, including gulp itself: the save dev flag updates the package JSON file with the corresponding plug-in the plugins are installed in a node modules directory with this method, you can easily reinstall all plugins and their dependencies later by using the package.
Json file, rather than reinstalling each plug-in individually, now note that plugins, a B and C a imaginary we’re just using those names to show how plugins work once the plugins are installed. They need to be loaded into the gulp file using require now you’re ready to define tasks. This task is named task ABC. It takes file from the some sources, files path and pipes and through functions from each of the plugins which modify the files.
The processed files are passed to gulp tests, which writes the files to some destination path. The task we just defined can be run from the command line by typing gulp space and the task name in this case. It’s gulp space task, ABC here’s a set of links for learning more about gulp ins. We’ve also built a code lab that takes you through common tasks, follow the link to get to the lab. Now don’t worry if you’ve missed any details, just look at the gulp documentation and our to find out more.
We supply gulp files with our code labs, so you’ll be all set for now. Let’s get back to writing PWA s and i’ll see you soon.
”. My guest is Marcy Sutton Head of Learning at Gatsby and former Developer Advocate at Deque Systems and today we’re talking About web accessibility, Let’s get started: [ MUSIC PLAYING ], So Marcy thanks for being here. What exactly does Accessibility mean MARCY SUTTON To me. It Means building websites that include people With disabilities, both building for People with disabilities and with people With disabilities, including them as Stakeholders hiring them to work on our teams.
Paying them for their work to review things. For accessibility and give us feedback Along the way, RICK VISCOMI, So when a Website isn’t accessible. What’s at stake, MARCY SUTTON A lot! If you think about how many Services are moving online if accessibility isn’t Built in then, it could present Barriers for people with disabilities, where They can’t use the service They might give up and Leave or worse, it might cause harm to Them if they have something like a traumatic Brain injury or seizure risk So there’s actually Quite a bit at stake if the web isn’t accessible, RICK VISCOMI, So even with The Domino’s lawsuit recently that came out where They lost their appeal.
Do you think that Websites will actually have a push towards more Accessible websites, especially now that lawyers Realize the legal risk MARCY SUTTON In The United States legislation can certainly Help and people can lean on the Law in this country to enforce their civil rights, So having rulings like The Domino’s ruling could potentially Help since there has been an absence of rulings, In favor of including websites under the Americans, With Disabilities Act, but I think there will be More to read in that space I have seen and read and Heard about companies looking at competitors, That have been sued and sort of feeling like Oh, maybe we’re next, so there can be some Market pressure, if there are legal actions being taken And if that’s what it takes, To make something accessible, then I think that’s moving.
In the right direction, RICK VISCOMI, Where do The breakdowns typically happen when a website Becomes inaccessible, Are the managers just Not buying into it Are the developers unaware Of the importance of it, lack of developer Tools all of the above MARCY SUTTON, I think It’s mostly an education issue and awareness, So to sort of try and Solve this problem, I advocate building a Culture around accessibility, so that everyone at the company Is involved and invested From project managers to Designers and developers, we all have a part to play in Making the web more accessible – And it is true that A lot of people just aren’t aware of the Impact that they could have There’s also the misconceptions That accessibility is costly and maybe not worth it.
It’s too niche of an audience, But actually it can improve. Things for a lot of people, If you think of it in Terms of inclusive design, the benefits that we Put into our websites like keyword, support, improving Contrast and font size those can help a lot of people, So it’s definitely worth it. And it’s easier and less costly. If you do it from the beginning, RICK VISCOMI. Is it something –? 10 % of the population has Some form of disability, so it’s more than niche, It actually affects A lot of people, MARCY SUTTON – I think it’s More than that, actually one in five people – RICK VISCOMI, Oh wow, MARCY SUTTON And the range of Disabilities is pretty wide, so there’s all Kinds of scenarios that people can be Browsing your website and they might have situational Or temporary disabilities People are born With disabilities There’s a whole spectrum of How people use the web that’s really kind of beautiful And if we can Embrace that, like we did with responsive Design and letting go of some of that control.
Over pixel perfection and how the user actually Visits our website there’s some real opportunities. There to innovate and make things that are way more robust, RICK VISCOMI. What did you Mean by situational disability, MARCY SUTTON, If You break your arm if you have a baby in one arm. Or a cup of tea or coffee, you might hold your Phone in a different way or have to switch arms If you are born with Something like that, you might permanently not Be able to use your arms, And so you have to use other Input modalities like voice, or maybe you use a joystick With your mouth or something And so there’s new Devices and ways of navigating that don’t rely.
On the default of perfectly working limbs and the abilities That most people, think of So there are some Opportunities and people are pretty resilient. They figure out ways. To navigate the web And if we can Support them better, then that’s pretty awesome, RICK VISCOMI That Reminds me of Android Auto, where, if I’m driving My car, my phone, is not necessarily a thing. I’r putting Right directly, in my face So their way of Interfacing with devices changes entirely depending On your situation, MARCY SUTTON, Yes and a Lot of those technologies were developed for People with disabilities, so it’s worth Considering that, maybe some of the things that We appreciate, and we can use every day were invented.
For people who needed it, RICK VISCOMI, I want to go back. To something that you mentioned earlier about having Users with disabilities, or even people with Disabilities on your team, as part of the Development process, How can you implement Accessibility as part of the Process in a way that ensures that the website’s Going to be accessible, MARCY, SUTTON Well, Certainly including people on your teams to be Stakeholders and provide feedback in regular intervals.
That would be the best way. Is to have people embedded on your teams who Have disabilities mainly because they Have experiences and perspectives that, as Able-Bodied developers, we just can’t make that up. It’s not your lived experience. So having that feedback, all the Time would be truly valuable And people get to Work on your teams and you pay them for Their work and I think that’s a really good way to go: RICK VISCOMI, How about Part of the design process, If a website, for example, Is built to be entirely using Canvas or Flash or Something if people have a specific technology, In mind where it’s just never going to be accessible, How can you actually prevent that from happening Where, in the design Process, do you actually make those decisions? To be accessible, MARCY SUTTON, I think Having some requirements about how users should be able To navigate the site should definitely start in design, I mean hopefully you’re Not getting too locked down on a given technology, — RICK, VISCOMI Hopefully not Flash MARCY SUTTON — in The design phase Yeah Flash no way But Canvas –.
There have Been whole websites built with Canvas And accessibility Unfortunately, was an afterthought in A lot of those cases – And we do have some Standards for Canvas that are better than They were four years ago, but you still have To re-implement a lot of native Functionality that you would get for free if you used The DOM or the Document Object Model RICK VISCOMI. Are you referring To the Accessibility Object Model, MARCY SUTTON, No, So with Canvas.
If you Provide fallback content, there’s a method called Draw focus if needed, You can pass off some Of these interactions from the two-dimensional Canvas Which is essentially a bitmap to that fallback content. And try to create some sort of a Semantic experience, but that’s a lot of work And if you can use the Document Object Model which does feed into what’s. Called the accessibility tree –, which is a fancy Term for a structure with accessibility, information – –: you can do a lot and Communicate to users of assistive technology, What’s going on on the screen, RICK VISCOMI, What’s the Current state of accessibility in developer tools, Either in the browser or as part of testing MARCY SUTTON, Pretty Great actually From when I got started as a Front-End developer everything for accessibility in terms Of this accessibility tree that I mentioned all Of that information was sort of hidden Under the hood And you had to go, Crawl through the Dom and go look at what was on The page and sort of just know what was going on there And now we have developer tools.
Like in Chrome and in Firefox, and it’s amazing how much you Can learn about accessibility through those tools? It would be great to Have more but we’ve come a really long way. Both with built-in dev tools and browser extensions, And automated tools, so I think the future is pretty Bright in terms of tooling RICK VISCOMI, What was your Experience with axe-core and what did it do? Marcy SUTTON, axe-core Is an accessibility API written with JavaScript? It’s an open source library that I used to work on full-time And it’s used in both Lighthouse And Accessibility, Insights from Microsoft, so it’s sort of An engine and a common rule set for testing accessibility And its used a lot of places.
It’s pretty cool, There’s other APIs. As well like WAVE and some others that aren’t Coming to mind at the moment, but it’s nice to have a common Set of rules and the engine that people can Count on and they can use it in different ways: Such as in browser extensions and in automated tooling To use a common rule set so that some Testers on your team aren’t using a different set. Of rules than the developers, for example, Because then you’re working Off two different sets of requirements, and it can Be hard to meet in the middle RICK VISCOMI You had Mentioned that axe-core’s integrated with Lighthouse The HTTP Archive runs Lighthouse On 5 million websites, so we can get some Of that analysis from axe-core aggregated To the scale of the web, I actually have a few stats, So 22 % of web pages tested Passed the color contrast audit from axe-core 50 % of pages are passing the Lighthouse image alt attribute being present audit, So it’s kind of surprising To see how low accessibility adoption is in certain Areas of the web and having a tool like Axe-Core is just really great to be able to get That visibility, MARCY SUTTON, Sadly It’s actually better than I expected RICK VISCOMI That Is pretty sad, MARCY SUTTON? It is sad Yeah, it’s depressing.
There is a project from WebAIM Called The WebAIM Million, where they ran the WAVE automated tool. Against the top 1 million home pages – And that was also a Very sad set of results because, as an industry, We have a lot more work to do a lot of work to Do to make that better Tools are helpful. In highlighting some of these low-hanging fruit, Things that we need to fix. But if we look at It in aggregate the picture is not very Pretty at the moment, RICK VISCOMI You Co-Authored “ Smashing Book 6” with your chapter titled “ Accessibility in Times of Single-Page, Apps.
”. So in what ways do accessibility, And single-page apps not play well together: MARCY SUTTON, Quite A few, unfortunately, I mean all of the Basics of accessibility apply if you’re building A website that’s heavy, with JavaScript So things like image, alt text and color contrast, But when we have this Javascript layer, that’s taking over a lot of The interactions that would be happening, In a web browser, we have to do a bit more To support users who are navigating with Assistive technology and using the keyboard Things like focus management, making announcements Using unobtrusive motion, If we’re using a Lot of JavaScript to try and delight Users, we have to try not to cause Harm with those But I’d say, probably the Focus management piece is the biggest Thing that we have to handle because If the browser is not refreshing, the page When the page changes a user using a Keyboard might be stuck in the prior part of The screen, or they have no idea what happened – If they’re in a screen reader or something So we have to manage Their experience going through the Application and that can be pretty cool.
Actually, I think it’s another area, That we can innovate And I’m hoping that frameworks And potentially browsers could help make this easier, So that would be a good space. To try and move the needle a bit to support developers without Them all having to re-implement all of the same things: RICK VISCOMI, Even kind of More of an old-school UI component, like modal dialogs Has its own focus problems? Can you describe some of The accessibility issues with modal dialogs and What’s being done on the HTML standard side to fix that MARCY, SUTTON Sure yeah, So modal dialogs are An example of some of these same Things I was talking about with focus management, So you have a layer that Opens up over the screen, It probably has content Behind it, maybe a screen curtain to gray it out When that modal opens, you Have to send focus into it, so the keyboard user Or screen reader user is in the right.
Part of the page they’re not left behind The modal window, So that means that you Also need to disable any interactive content. Behind that modal window and that part can Get pretty tricky You have to do some DOM Walking potentially set aria-hidden and tabindex On interactive controls and most people are not Going to do that DOM walking It’s hard. It’s expensive performance, Wise and you have to do it –, you know every time the modal Opens walk it down and –.
It’s like you’re doing it. In inverse both directions, So what would be great Is in the standard space, if we could have Something like HTML inert. It’s an attribute that Was proposed a while back, I think it was at Risk of being removed – and nobody is convinced, That we really need it. This is me officially Saying yes, we need it because the alternative Is a lot of DOM walking that, frankly, very little People are going to do So.
What that would do for us Is make it a lot easier to set a Boolean attribute in Html to effectively disable whole subtrees of the HTML Dom And that way when we send focus into a Modal, we don’t have to do as much in the background. It helps to have Sibling elements, so maybe the modal and the Content behind it are siblings. That way, you can just turn Off all the other content, So that does take a bit Of work from the developer to structure their DOM that Way, but that attribute would solve a whole Lot of pain, as well as the dialog element in HTML, That’s another one.
That’s At risk of being removed, I think it’s Firefox At this point that we need to implement dialog That could give us some of this Behavior for free, like focus management having a Semantic HTML element that would tell users of Assistive technology that it is a dialogue, So there’s some Patterns here that — to have every Developer in the world have to re-implement the same Things over and over again, it seems like we should Have some more primitives for making that easier, RICK, VISCOMI Yeah That sounds super important MARCY SUTTON And complicated [ CHUCKLING ], RICK VISCOMI, You’ve advocated In the past, for something called an accessibility, Statement, What is that, and why is that? So good for accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Accessibility, Statements are great tools, no matter what kind of a website You’re making, whether it’s with heavy JavaScript or not So an accessibility, Statement is generally a page on your website.
That’s easy to find: maybe it’s linked. Your website footer, and it has things Like what you’re doing to improve accessibility, Maybe what level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? That you’re aiming for It’s nice to have that Goal and that target whether or not you’ve Actually met it, but you have to keep actively Working at that to improve You can also collect Any accessibility, tips or information about Keyboard shortcuts or ways to use your website For accessibility and ways for users To contact you, That’s one of the Most important pieces having an affirmative Statement that says: hey, we might not Be perfect at this, but we’d love your feedback.
And get in touch with us And if people do Act on that feedback, So it’s opening That conversation to bring people in and Make them feel included and give them a way To give you feedback, Because a lot of These websites that have glaring Accessibility issues: we have no way to contact them, So you might see some tweets Of people calling out companies because they can’t use the Website or the service, Maybe an update to the Website or application breaks, what used to work? So if you have That statement it gives people a way to contact You in an official blog so that you can act On that feedback, RICK VISCOMI, It must be really Reassuring to go to a website and see that they actually Care about accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Absolutely RICK, VISCOMI, So What resources would you recommend for Web developers, who want to learn more about Creating accessible websites, MARCY SUTTON, So many –, The A11Y Project, Is really great? There’s an accessibility, Course, from Alice Boxhall and Rob Dodson at Google, on Udacity, I have a page on my website.
It’s MarcySutton.Com, There’s a web accessibility. Resources guide there and I collect things like Books and tools and articles and things that I refer to a lot There’s quite a bit out there. From companies like WebAIM, They have really great articles Deque. My former employer has A thing called Deque University: They offer free Accessibility, training to people with disabilities; Which is really great So there’s definitely a wealth.
Of information out there Just getting it to the people, To solve this education problem is sort of the gap that We need to figure out RICK VISCOMI And how About No Mouse Mondays, or what do you call it? Marcy SUTTON? Yes, I released an npm Package this week to sort of put a tool in the Hands of developers to turn off the mouse cursor for everyone, It was sort of a Joke but it actually could be useful as a Dev tool so something to pull into your Project maybe one day a week to actually have a No mouse day of the week, RICK VISCOMI, That reminds me Of 2G Tuesdays or something to get the feel for Slow performance, MARCY, SUTTON, Yeah, RICK VISCOMI.
I think That’s a good idea: MARCY SUTTON Yeah, It’s sort of a Chaos Monkey Approach to things of you know, if you Unplug, your mouse or don’t have that capability. How resilient is your design? Can you actually use it And some of the most Glaring accessibility challenges I see are with color Contrast and a lack of keyboard access, So if we could Somehow, culturally, build in tools and processes. To get us thinking about that, that would help So the No-Mouse Mondays is the First experimental version, but I have plans for it: RICK VISCOMI, It’s a good idea, All right Marcy.
This has been great Thanks for coming on the show MARCY SUTTON. Thank you. So much for having me RICK VISCOMI, You Can check out links to everything we talked about? In the description below, Thanks for reading and We’ll see you next time, [ MUSIC PLAYING ]
We want to know what users are doing on our site, which pages are popular, whether users follow the paths we expect and if anything goes wrong. Analytics is all about collecting measurements of user activity on the site. Google Analytics is a service that collects processes and reports.
Data about an applications, use patterns and performance, adding Google Analytics to a web application enables the collection of data like visitor traffic, user agent, the user’s location, etc. This data is sent to Google Analytics servers where it is processed. The reports are available in the Google Analytics web interface and throw reporting API. Google Analytics is free and highly customizable.
Integrating Google Analytics is simple. First, you must create a Google Analytics account. Each account has properties, these aren’t JavaScript properties, but refer to individual applications or websites. Google Analytics then generates a tracking snippet for each property. This is a piece of JavaScript that you pasted into your page. It sends data to Google Analytics back-end. You can also use the analytics library to create custom analytics, such as tracking specific user actions or tracking push notifications.
I want to say a bit more about properties. An account has properties that represent individual collections of data. These properties have property, IDs, also called tracking IDs. That identify them to Google Analytics if an account represents a company. One property in that account might represent the company’s website, while another property might represent the company’s mobile app. If you only have one app, the simplest scenario is to create a single Google Analytics account and add a single property.
To that account. The analytics server will then generate a custom bit of JavaScript matching your account and property. This is the tracking snippets. This is the key part of the tracking snippet. The entire snippet needs to be pasted into every page. You want to track at a high level when this script runs. It creates an a syncs Tagg that downloads analytics is the analytics library defines the GA function called the command.
Q creates a tracker that gathers user data and sends this data as a pageview hit via HTTP request to Google Analytics. This data is analyzed and stored in your analytics account, in addition to the data gathered by tracker creation, the page view event allows Google Analytics to infer what pages the user is visiting, how long they are visiting them and in what order for simpler applications. This is the only coding required note that you can replace analytics j/s with analytics underscore debug KS for console debugging.
Using this version will log detailed messages to the console for each hit, sent it also logs warnings and errors for your tracking code. The data is sent to Google Analytics back-end where it is processed into reports. These reports are available through the Google Analytics dashboard. Here is the audience overview interface. Here you can see general information such as page view, records bounce rate, ratio of new and returning visitors and other statistics, it’s also possible to view analytics information in real time.
This interface allows you to see hits as they occur on your site. I encourage you to take some time and explore there’s an extensive set of features in the dashboard. You should explore the standard reports and look at creating your own. Knowing how to use analytics effectively is a skill in itself. Fortunately, the Google Analytics Academy offers a free set of online courses. I encourage you to install analytics on some of your sites.
If you haven’t already check out the free analytics Academy courses as well, then once you’re comfortable with analytics, come back and I’ll show you how to integrate analytics into a PWA. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you soon,
”. My guest is Marcy Sutton Head of Learning at Gatsby and former Developer Advocate at Deque Systems and today we’re talking About web accessibility, Let’s get started: [ MUSIC PLAYING ], So Marcy thanks for being here. What exactly does Accessibility mean MARCY SUTTON To me. It Means building websites that include people With disabilities, both building for People with disabilities and with people With disabilities, including them as Stakeholders hiring them to work on our teams.
Paying them for their work to review things. For accessibility and give us feedback Along the way, RICK VISCOMI, So when a Website isn’t accessible. What’s at stake, MARCY SUTTON A lot! If you think about how many Services are moving online if accessibility isn’t Built in then, it could present Barriers for people with disabilities, where They can’t use the service They might give up and Leave or worse, it might cause harm to Them if they have something like a traumatic Brain injury or seizure risk So there’s actually Quite a bit at stake if the web isn’t accessible, RICK VISCOMI, So even with The Domino’s lawsuit recently that came out where They lost their appeal.
Do you think that Websites will actually have a push towards more Accessible websites, especially now that lawyers Realize the legal risk MARCY SUTTON In The United States legislation can certainly Help and people can lean on the Law in this country to enforce their civil rights, So having rulings like The Domino’s ruling could potentially Help since there has been an absence of rulings, In favor of including websites under the Americans, With Disabilities Act, but I think there will be More to read in that space I have seen and read and Heard about companies looking at competitors, That have been sued and sort of feeling like Oh, maybe we’re next, so there can be some Market pressure, if there are legal actions being taken And if that’s what it takes, To make something accessible, then I think that’s moving.
In the right direction, RICK VISCOMI, Where do The breakdowns typically happen when a website Becomes inaccessible, Are the managers just Not buying into it Are the developers unaware Of the importance of it, lack of developer Tools all of the above MARCY SUTTON, I think It’s mostly an education issue and awareness, So to sort of try and Solve this problem, I advocate building a Culture around accessibility, so that everyone at the company Is involved and invested From project managers to Designers and developers, we all have a part to play in Making the web more accessible – And it is true that A lot of people just aren’t aware of the Impact that they could have There’s also the misconceptions That accessibility is costly and maybe not worth it.
It’s too niche of an audience, But actually it can improve. Things for a lot of people, If you think of it in Terms of inclusive design, the benefits that we Put into our websites like keyword, support, improving Contrast and font size those can help a lot of people, So it’s definitely worth it. And it’s easier and less costly. If you do it from the beginning, RICK VISCOMI. Is it something –? 10 % of the population has Some form of disability, so it’s more than niche, It actually affects A lot of people, MARCY SUTTON – I think it’s More than that, actually one in five people – RICK VISCOMI, Oh wow, MARCY SUTTON And the range of Disabilities is pretty wide, so there’s all Kinds of scenarios that people can be Browsing your website and they might have situational Or temporary disabilities People are born With disabilities There’s a whole spectrum of How people use the web that’s really kind of beautiful And if we can Embrace that, like we did with responsive Design and letting go of some of that control.
Over pixel perfection and how the user actually Visits our website there’s some real opportunities. There to innovate and make things that are way more robust, RICK VISCOMI. What did you Mean by situational disability, MARCY SUTTON, If You break your arm if you have a baby in one arm. Or a cup of tea or coffee, you might hold your Phone in a different way or have to switch arms If you are born with Something like that, you might permanently not Be able to use your arms, And so you have to use other Input modalities like voice, or maybe you use a joystick With your mouth or something And so there’s new Devices and ways of navigating that don’t rely.
On the default of perfectly working limbs and the abilities That most people, think of So there are some Opportunities and people are pretty resilient. They figure out ways. To navigate the web And if we can Support them better, then that’s pretty awesome, RICK VISCOMI That Reminds me of Android Auto, where, if I’m driving My car, my phone, is not necessarily a thing. I’r putting Right directly, in my face So their way of Interfacing with devices changes entirely depending On your situation, MARCY SUTTON, Yes and a Lot of those technologies were developed for People with disabilities, so it’s worth Considering that, maybe some of the things that We appreciate, and we can use every day were invented.
For people who needed it, RICK VISCOMI, I want to go back. To something that you mentioned earlier about having Users with disabilities, or even people with Disabilities on your team, as part of the Development process, How can you implement Accessibility as part of the Process in a way that ensures that the website’s Going to be accessible, MARCY, SUTTON Well, Certainly including people on your teams to be Stakeholders and provide feedback in regular intervals.
That would be the best way. Is to have people embedded on your teams who Have disabilities mainly because they Have experiences and perspectives that, as Able-Bodied developers, we just can’t make that up. It’s not your lived experience. So having that feedback, all the Time would be truly valuable And people get to Work on your teams and you pay them for Their work and I think that’s a really good way to go: RICK VISCOMI, How about Part of the design process, If a website, for example, Is built to be entirely using Canvas or Flash or Something if people have a specific technology, In mind where it’s just never going to be accessible, How can you actually prevent that from happening Where, in the design Process, do you actually make those decisions? To be accessible, MARCY SUTTON, I think Having some requirements about how users should be able To navigate the site should definitely start in design, I mean hopefully you’re Not getting too locked down on a given technology, — RICK, VISCOMI Hopefully not Flash MARCY SUTTON — in The design phase Yeah Flash no way But Canvas –.
There have Been whole websites built with Canvas And accessibility Unfortunately, was an afterthought in A lot of those cases – And we do have some Standards for Canvas that are better than They were four years ago, but you still have To re-implement a lot of native Functionality that you would get for free if you used The DOM or the Document Object Model RICK VISCOMI. Are you referring To the Accessibility Object Model, MARCY SUTTON, No, So with Canvas.
If you Provide fallback content, there’s a method called Draw focus if needed, You can pass off some Of these interactions from the two-dimensional Canvas Which is essentially a bitmap to that fallback content. And try to create some sort of a Semantic experience, but that’s a lot of work And if you can use the Document Object Model which does feed into what’s. Called the accessibility tree –, which is a fancy Term for a structure with accessibility, information – –: you can do a lot and Communicate to users of assistive technology, What’s going on on the screen, RICK VISCOMI, What’s the Current state of accessibility in developer tools, Either in the browser or as part of testing MARCY SUTTON, Pretty Great actually From when I got started as a Front-End developer everything for accessibility in terms Of this accessibility tree that I mentioned all Of that information was sort of hidden Under the hood And you had to go, Crawl through the Dom and go look at what was on The page and sort of just know what was going on there And now we have developer tools.
Like in Chrome and in Firefox, and it’s amazing how much you Can learn about accessibility through those tools? It would be great to Have more but we’ve come a really long way. Both with built-in dev tools and browser extensions, And automated tools, so I think the future is pretty Bright in terms of tooling RICK VISCOMI, What was your Experience with axe-core and what did it do? Marcy SUTTON, axe-core Is an accessibility API written with JavaScript? It’s an open source library that I used to work on full-time And it’s used in both Lighthouse And Accessibility, Insights from Microsoft, so it’s sort of An engine and a common rule set for testing accessibility And its used a lot of places.
It’s pretty cool, There’s other APIs. As well like WAVE and some others that aren’t Coming to mind at the moment, but it’s nice to have a common Set of rules and the engine that people can Count on and they can use it in different ways: Such as in browser extensions and in automated tooling To use a common rule set so that some Testers on your team aren’t using a different set. Of rules than the developers, for example, Because then you’re working Off two different sets of requirements, and it can Be hard to meet in the middle RICK VISCOMI You had Mentioned that axe-core’s integrated with Lighthouse The HTTP Archive runs Lighthouse On 5 million websites, so we can get some Of that analysis from axe-core aggregated To the scale of the web, I actually have a few stats, So 22 % of web pages tested Passed the color contrast audit from axe-core 50 % of pages are passing the Lighthouse image alt attribute being present audit, So it’s kind of surprising To see how low accessibility adoption is in certain Areas of the web and having a tool like Axe-Core is just really great to be able to get That visibility, MARCY SUTTON, Sadly It’s actually better than I expected RICK VISCOMI That Is pretty sad, MARCY SUTTON? It is sad Yeah, it’s depressing.
There is a project from WebAIM Called The WebAIM Million, where they ran the WAVE automated tool. Against the top 1 million home pages – And that was also a Very sad set of results because, as an industry, We have a lot more work to do a lot of work to Do to make that better Tools are helpful. In highlighting some of these low-hanging fruit, Things that we need to fix. But if we look at It in aggregate the picture is not very Pretty at the moment, RICK VISCOMI You Co-Authored “ Smashing Book 6” with your chapter titled “ Accessibility in Times of Single-Page, Apps.
”. So in what ways do accessibility, And single-page apps not play well together: MARCY SUTTON, Quite A few, unfortunately, I mean all of the Basics of accessibility apply if you’re building A website that’s heavy, with JavaScript So things like image, alt text and color contrast, But when we have this Javascript layer, that’s taking over a lot of The interactions that would be happening, In a web browser, we have to do a bit more To support users who are navigating with Assistive technology and using the keyboard Things like focus management, making announcements Using unobtrusive motion, If we’re using a Lot of JavaScript to try and delight Users, we have to try not to cause Harm with those But I’d say, probably the Focus management piece is the biggest Thing that we have to handle because If the browser is not refreshing, the page When the page changes a user using a Keyboard might be stuck in the prior part of The screen, or they have no idea what happened – If they’re in a screen reader or something So we have to manage Their experience going through the Application and that can be pretty cool.
Actually, I think it’s another area, That we can innovate And I’m hoping that frameworks And potentially browsers could help make this easier, So that would be a good space. To try and move the needle a bit to support developers without Them all having to re-implement all of the same things: RICK VISCOMI, Even kind of More of an old-school UI component, like modal dialogs Has its own focus problems? Can you describe some of The accessibility issues with modal dialogs and What’s being done on the HTML standard side to fix that MARCY, SUTTON Sure yeah, So modal dialogs are An example of some of these same Things I was talking about with focus management, So you have a layer that Opens up over the screen, It probably has content Behind it, maybe a screen curtain to gray it out When that modal opens, you Have to send focus into it, so the keyboard user Or screen reader user is in the right.
Part of the page they’re not left behind The modal window, So that means that you Also need to disable any interactive content. Behind that modal window and that part can Get pretty tricky You have to do some DOM Walking potentially set aria-hidden and tabindex On interactive controls and most people are not Going to do that DOM walking It’s hard. It’s expensive performance, Wise and you have to do it –, you know every time the modal Opens walk it down and –.
It’s like you’re doing it. In inverse both directions, So what would be great Is in the standard space, if we could have Something like HTML inert. It’s an attribute that Was proposed a while back, I think it was at Risk of being removed – and nobody is convinced, That we really need it. This is me officially Saying yes, we need it because the alternative Is a lot of DOM walking that, frankly, very little People are going to do So.
What that would do for us Is make it a lot easier to set a Boolean attribute in Html to effectively disable whole subtrees of the HTML Dom And that way when we send focus into a Modal, we don’t have to do as much in the background. It helps to have Sibling elements, so maybe the modal and the Content behind it are siblings. That way, you can just turn Off all the other content, So that does take a bit Of work from the developer to structure their DOM that Way, but that attribute would solve a whole Lot of pain, as well as the dialog element in HTML, That’s another one.
That’s At risk of being removed, I think it’s Firefox At this point that we need to implement dialog That could give us some of this Behavior for free, like focus management having a Semantic HTML element that would tell users of Assistive technology that it is a dialogue, So there’s some Patterns here that — to have every Developer in the world have to re-implement the same Things over and over again, it seems like we should Have some more primitives for making that easier, RICK, VISCOMI Yeah That sounds super important MARCY SUTTON And complicated [ CHUCKLING ], RICK VISCOMI, You’ve advocated In the past, for something called an accessibility, Statement, What is that, and why is that? So good for accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Accessibility, Statements are great tools, no matter what kind of a website You’re making, whether it’s with heavy JavaScript or not So an accessibility, Statement is generally a page on your website.
That’s easy to find: maybe it’s linked. Your website footer, and it has things Like what you’re doing to improve accessibility, Maybe what level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? That you’re aiming for It’s nice to have that Goal and that target whether or not you’ve Actually met it, but you have to keep actively Working at that to improve You can also collect Any accessibility, tips or information about Keyboard shortcuts or ways to use your website For accessibility and ways for users To contact you, That’s one of the Most important pieces having an affirmative Statement that says: hey, we might not Be perfect at this, but we’d love your feedback.
And get in touch with us And if people do Act on that feedback, So it’s opening That conversation to bring people in and Make them feel included and give them a way To give you feedback, Because a lot of These websites that have glaring Accessibility issues: we have no way to contact them, So you might see some tweets Of people calling out companies because they can’t use the Website or the service, Maybe an update to the Website or application breaks, what used to work? So if you have That statement it gives people a way to contact You in an official blog so that you can act On that feedback, RICK VISCOMI, It must be really Reassuring to go to a website and see that they actually Care about accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Absolutely RICK, VISCOMI, So What resources would you recommend for Web developers, who want to learn more about Creating accessible websites, MARCY SUTTON, So many –, The A11Y Project, Is really great? There’s an accessibility, Course, from Alice Boxhall and Rob Dodson at Google, on Udacity, I have a page on my website.
It’s MarcySutton.Com, There’s a web accessibility. Resources guide there and I collect things like Books and tools and articles and things that I refer to a lot There’s quite a bit out there. From companies like WebAIM, They have really great articles Deque. My former employer has A thing called Deque University: They offer free Accessibility, training to people with disabilities; Which is really great So there’s definitely a wealth.
Of information out there Just getting it to the people, To solve this education problem is sort of the gap that We need to figure out RICK VISCOMI And how About No Mouse Mondays, or what do you call it? Marcy SUTTON? Yes, I released an npm Package this week to sort of put a tool in the Hands of developers to turn off the mouse cursor for everyone, It was sort of a Joke but it actually could be useful as a Dev tool so something to pull into your Project maybe one day a week to actually have a No mouse day of the week, RICK VISCOMI, That reminds me Of 2G Tuesdays or something to get the feel for Slow performance, MARCY, SUTTON, Yeah, RICK VISCOMI.
I think That’s a good idea: MARCY SUTTON Yeah, It’s sort of a Chaos Monkey Approach to things of you know, if you Unplug, your mouse or don’t have that capability. How resilient is your design? Can you actually use it And some of the most Glaring accessibility challenges I see are with color Contrast and a lack of keyboard access, So if we could Somehow, culturally, build in tools and processes. To get us thinking about that, that would help So the No-Mouse Mondays is the First experimental version, but I have plans for it: RICK VISCOMI, It’s a good idea, All right Marcy.
This has been great Thanks for coming on the show MARCY SUTTON. Thank you. So much for having me RICK VISCOMI, You Can check out links to everything we talked about? In the description below, Thanks for reading and We’ll see you next time, [ MUSIC PLAYING ]
Today, I’m going to talk about web development on Chromebooks. Here is a quote from you. A skilled web developer. Chromebooks are awesome and, if you don’t remember saying this recently, I hope that after reading this article, it will become a daily thing. Chromebooks are known for being lightweight fast, secure web browsing machines.
They are so much more. The device portfolio has grown to include tablets, detachable z’, all-in-one, mini desktops and, of course, laptops and convertibles. Many of these are capable development devices. So what can you run on them? Well, ideas like visual studio code, Atom, webstorm tools like node, react, docker and get, and you can test your web apps with multiple browsers, including real mobile browsers as well.
You can check how your mobile app interacts with your web server all right on the same device. Okay, let’s get started and get your Chrome OS device ready for development. We are going to set up a Linux environment and then install the tools you need to start open, Chrome settings and search or scroll down to Linux. Click turn on this will download and setup a Linux environment when it’s complete, you’ll see a terminal prompt pro tip.
If you will be doing a lot of development, pin the terminal by right-clicking and choosing pin now we have a Linux environment. Let’s install some tools head over to the visual studio code website and download the Linux dot de Bie package, double click and choose install once it’s installed. You can find vs code in your app launcher. If you’re going to be using this IDE a lot, you can pin it like, we did with the terminal.
Any application with a dot de Bie package can be installed in a similar way. Let’s install atom, the process is exactly the same: download install and launch not every app has a dot de Bie package, but you can install any of your favorite tools that support Debian Linux, for example, to install sublime text, follow the Linux instructions on the website to Setup, the apt, repo and install the editor using the command-line when we install node in a few seconds, we’ll take a closer look at command-line installation and the same thing goes for apps like webstorm.
Just go to the website, follow the Linux download and install instructions. I won’t do a web storm right now. Let’s get right on to the server side of things, oh and by the way, at the end of this article, I will direct you to a page by the Chrome, OS Deverell team, with installation instructions for all the apps and more discussed in this article. Now, beyond what I mentioned today in this article, if your favorite tool is supported in Linux, it should run on Chromebooks.
For example, I, like G edit for text, editing FileZilla as an FTP, client and Inkscape for vector, graphics, editing. Today, web development usually takes more than a text editor an IDE or an FTP client. Let’s get to some other tools, so we can make some really nice web apps nodejs requires GnuPG to open up your terminal and install it with apt that command is sudo apt, install GnuPG 2. If you’re new to apt, you can probably guess that by replacing GnuPG 2 with whatever package name you want, it will install that package now.
Finding the right package name can sometimes be the tricky part note, as we continue with this article and other terminal commands. I won’t read every line out loud, but, as mentioned, I will provide a link at the end that has them all now that the dependency is installed. Let’s get nodejs run this curl command, followed by another apt, install command for node. That’s it. No js’ is ready to go, don’t believe me! Well, let’s try it out with procs use git to clone the procs repo an NPM to install, build and serve the proxy web app navigate to localhost 8080 in your web browser and check it out pretty cool.
So much minesweeping to be done. Let’s try react using NPM, you can install, create react. App, then use create react app to create a skeleton project. Here I call it hello. World react navigate into the directory where it was created and call NPM start now, navigate to localhost 3000 in your browser and check it out. If you prefer angular install that too, the steps are almost the same again. We use NPM to install at angular slash CLI, create an angular app using ng new.
My angular project change directories into the project folder using CD for change directory. My angular project now ng serve browse to localhost 4200 and check it out here. You’ll notice that I have procs a react, app and an angular app all running on different ports, all on the same Chromebook. I think this is pretty handy. What’s more, this is all local. So as long as your tools are already installed, you could do all of your development offline say like on a plane.
What about docker, no problem again we’re going to follow the normal Linux installation steps. First, we double check that all the dependencies are installed. We add the docker repository to apt and then we update the apt package list. Since we just added a new repository. We use sudo apt update to do this, then install docker test it out by running hello world. This is done with sudo docker run hello world.
You should get a nice mess showing that everything is working. Let’s do something a little bit more advanced by running an Ubuntu Linux container and docker sudo docker run it Ubuntu bash and there you go. Your output is going to look something like this in the Ubuntu container. I’ve taken a look at the OS version with cat, slash et Cie / OS version, and you can see it’s really Ubuntu now, once an app is ready to deploy, it should be tested because Chromebooks have web Android and Linux.
You can test across multiple browsers on multiple platforms: alright, on the same device, let’s install a whole pile of browsers to prove this point using the terminal in apt. You install Firefox for Linux note in debian the package name is Firefox ESR. Then, let’s also install the chromium browser for Linux feeling brave. Let’s install the brave browser for Linux. I won’t walk through all of these lines right now, but again they are just the standard installation instructions for Debian Linux.
We install the GPG key. We install the repo and finally brave now if for browsers, aren’t enough, let’s add a few more head over to the Google Play, Store and install some Android browsers. Let’s go with Firefox for Android opera for Android and Chrome Beta for Android. We now have seven browsers installed, which can give us a reasonable first attempt at test coverage. We have the Chrome, OS Chrome browser three Android browsers, that is Firefox Chrome, Beta and opera, three Linux browsers Firefox for Linux, brave and chromium, and here you can see that our procs web app is running on all seven one.
Last thing to mention in case you have a mobile app that interacts with your web service. You can do Android, TBWA and flutter development on Chrome OS devices, which means you can build and package your mobile app on your Chromebook test it right on the device. You were coding on, like any other Android app build your web component, start your web server and then test everything on multiple browsers and see how it interacts right on the device.
Android studio is as easy to install as visual studio code or atom head over to the Android studio site and download the dot de Bie file. Then you can code. Your app like you’d expect an Android studio with one cool difference: you’ll notice that you can push directly to the Chromebook you’re working on pretty cool full instructions on how to set this up can be found on the link. At the end of this article on the android page, so with your chromebook, you can build web apps with the tools you are used to develop and test right on device with tools like nodejs docker and angular tests across multiple browsers, including mobile, browsers and even test Mobile app and web interaction right on device, and all of this could even happen offline like on a long flight.
So now, don’t you agree. Chromebooks are awesome, as promised. Here is a link to a guide to get your Linux environment customized. Just the way you like. It’s cross dot, page dot, link slash web dev. Thank you can’t wait to see what you build.
This diagram gives an overview on the client side. Your webpage interacts with service workers which in turn receive push events via the user agent, also known as the browser and on the backend.
You send messages from your application server to the push service, which then delivers them to the correct client. Let’s look at the notification API first, this allows developers to display notifications to the user. Before we can create a notification. We need to get permission from the user. This code will prompt the user permissions to show notifications. You can try this out from the browser console as you’ll see later, permission is requested automatically when subscribing to a push service.
So there’s no need to call this function when using just push notifications. Let’s take a look at some examples for configuring and displaying a notification from a service worker. We first check that permission has been granted. Then we call show notification on the service worker registration object and pass in the notification title. You can also try this out from the browser console. Try it on the new tab page now for push notifications.
You call show notification in the service worker in response to a push event. When a message arrives, we can specify an optional options: object to configure the notification. This is passed in as the second argument. In the show notification function, the body property is the body text displayed below the title icon? Is the image displayed at the top of notification? Vibrate is the vibration pattern for phones, in this case 100 milliseconds on 15 milliseconds off 130 seconds on so on, data is the arbitrary data we can retrieve in the service worker when the user interacts with the modification.
In this example, primarykey allows us to identify which notification was clicked when handling the interaction in the serviceworker. Let’s try that out. We can add action buttons to the notification that we can then handle each in a different way. Here’s what that looks like notification, interaction events are handled in the service worker tapping clicking or closing the notification. There are two notification interactions you can listen for in the service worker notification.
Close the notification close event only triggers when the notification is dismissed via a direct action on the notification. If the user dismisses all notifications, the event will not trigger, and this is done to save resources, notification, click. If the user clicks the notification or an action button in the notification, the notification click event is triggered. If the user clicked on an action, the action is attached to the event object of the notification click handler.
We can check which action was triggered and handle it separately. Now, let’s see how the two handlers work in a service worker. First notification close: we access the notification, object from the event object and we can get the data from the notification object. We might use the primary key property from the data to identify which notification was clicked in a notification click handler. We can determine what action button.
The user pressed by inspecting the action property on the event object. Note that each browser displays notification actions differently and some don’t display them at all to compensate. We put a default experience in this example in an else block after checking which action was clicked so that something will happen on a simple click of the notification. Now, let’s see how you send push messages from your server and handle incoming messages on your client web app.
Each browser manages push notifications through its own system called a push service when a user grants permission for push on your site, you subscribe them to the brow. Push service: this creates a subscription object that includes a public key to enable messages to be encrypted and an endpoint URL for the browser’s push service, which is unique for each user from your server. Send your push messages to this URL encrypted with the public key.
The push service sends the message to the right client. Now the service worker will be woken up to handle incoming push messages when a push event is fired, and this allows your app to react to push messages. For example, by displaying a notification using service worker registration show notification, your app doesn’t need to listen to or Pole for messages and the browser doesn’t even need to be open.
All the work is done under the hood as efficiently as possible by the browser and the operating system, and this is great for saving battery and CPU usage. Let’s go through that step by step in the apps main JavaScript call push manager subscribe on the serviceworker registration object, get the subscription object and convert it to jason, get the endpoint URL and public key and save this to your server, for example, by using a fetch Request send the message payload from your server to the endpoint URL encrypted with the public key.
The push message raises a push event in a serviceworker which we can handle in a push event handler in push event handler. We get the data from the message and display a notification. The push API allows users to subscribe to messages sent from your app server that are sent via the push service used by the browser and subscribing, of course, is done in the JavaScript. For the page, responding to push events, for example by displaying a notification, is done in the serviceworker, just to repeat subscribing to the push service and getting the subscription object happen in the JavaScript for the page.
First, we check if the user is already subscribed and update the page UI accordingly, if they are not subscribed, prompt them to subscribe, if they are already subscribed, update the server with the latest since that may have changed by the push service, since it was last used When the user grants permission for push on your site, you subscribe them to the browsers push service, as I said before, this creates a special subscription object that contains the endpoint URL for the push service, which is different for each browser, along with a public key.
We send the subscription object for this user to the server and save it now before you subscribe a user check if you already have a subscription object, if you don’t have the object again update the UI to prompt the user to enable push notifications, and if you Do have the subscription object, update your server database with the latest subscription object. The ready property of the service worker defines whether a service worker is ready to control the page or not.
It returns a promise which resolves to a serviceworker registration object. When the service worker becomes active, the get subscription function returns the subscription object or undefined. If it doesn’t exist, we need to perform this check every time. The user accesses our app because it is possible for subscription objects to change during their lifetime. This is the process of subscribing to the push service register, the service worker from the main page main jeaious.
This request goes to the user agent. The user agent returns the service worker registration, object, use the service worker at registration, object to access the push manager API and from that requests are subscribed to the push service. This request is passed on to the push service. The push service returns. The subscription object, which includes the endpoint URL and the public key, save the subscription object data to your server and send push messages from your server to the endpoint URL encrypted with the public key.
Like I said now before sending notifications, we must subscribe to a push service. We call push manager subscribe on the service worker registration object to subscribe and the resulting push subscription object includes all the information. The application needs to send a push me such an endpoint and encryption key needed for sending data each subscription is unique to a service worker. The end point for the subscription is a unique capability.
Url knowledge of the endpoint is all that is necessary to send a message to your application. The endpoint URL therefore needs to be kept secret or other applications might be able to send push messages to your application. Here’s an example of the subscription object. This is the object returned from the push service. When we call reg push manage, add subscribe. The subscription object has two parts.
The first part is an endpoint URL. The address on the push service to send messages to this includes an ID that enables the push service to send a message to the correct client and service worker. The second part of the subscription object is the keys property. The p25 6d H key is an elliptic curve, diffie-hellman ECD H public key for message. Encryption. The earth key is an authentication secret that your application server uses in authentication of its messages.
These keys are used by your application, server to encrypt and authenticate messages for the push subscription and, let’s see how the process of sending a message is done. The server generates a message encrypted with the public key and then sends it to the endpoint URL in the subscription object. The URL contains the address of the push service along with subscription ID, which allows the push service to identify the client to receive the message.
The message is received in the push service which routed to the right, client and the process of sending a push message from the server works. Like this. A back-end service on your server sends a push message to the push service using the endpoint URL from the subscription object. The message must be encrypted with the public key from the subscription object. The push service uses subscription IDs encoded in the endpoint URL, to send the message to the right user agent.
The push event is picked up by the service worker. The service worker gets the data from the message and displays a notification in this example. We’re using Google’s web push library for nodejs to send a push message from a node.Js server. The TTL value in the options specifies the time in seconds that the push service should keep trying to deliver the message now. This is important to set correctly some messages.
Have a short life some may be valid for several hours or more. We then pass in the subscription object. Payload and options object to send notification. You need a way to ensure secure communication between the user and your server and between your server and the push service and between the push service and the user. In other words, the user needs to be sure that messages are from the domain. They claim to be from and have not been tampered with by the push service you need to make sure the user is who they claim to be valid, was created to solve this problem.
This vapid identification information can be used by the push service to attribute requests that are made by the same application server to a single entity. This can be used to reduce the secrecy for push subscription URLs by being able to restrict subscriptions to a specific application server. An application server is further able to include additional information. The operator of a push service can use to contact the operator of the application server in order to use vapid, we need to generate a public/private key pair and subscribe to the push service using the public key.
The public key must be first converted from URL base64 to a you in 8 array. This is then passed into the application. Server key parameter in the subscribed method. The web push library, provides a method generate vapid keys, which generates the keys. This should be used once in the command line when push generate vapid, keys, Jason and the keys stored somewhere safe. We can use the web push library to send a message with the required vapid details.
We add a vapid details, object in the options parameter. That includes the parameter required for the request signing now. Let’s look at messages from the receiving end in the web. App on the client handling push, events happens in the surface worker, the service worker will be woken up to handle incoming push messages and a push event is fired. This allows your app to react to push messages, for example, by displaying a notification using service worker registration, show notification to display a push notification.
You listen for the push event in the service worker. You get the push message. Data from the push event object in this example, we simply convert the message: data to text The Wrap, show notification in a wait until to extend the lifetime of the push event. Until the show notification promise resolves, the push event will not be reported as successfully completed until the notification has displayed.
You can practice working with the notification and the push API by following the lab that accompanies this article, one small gotcha, don’t use private or incognito mode for this lab for security reasons, push notifications are not supported in private or incognito mode. You
This replaces the payment forms on a site with a much simpler experience on mobile devices. So let’s talk about paying for things on the web. This is a longer talk, so let me give you an idea of what’s coming up. First, we’ll talk about the user experience today and what could be better, we’ll look at the payment request, API twice.
First, to give you the big picture, then we’ll dive into the code. Finally, you’ll get the usual resources in lab. It’s no surprise, given the rise of mobile computing, that a majority of commercial traffic is coming from mobile devices, what is surprising is that 66 % of that mobile commerce is still happening on the web, even when people have native apps installed. Unfortunately, we also see a lot lower conversion rate on mobile web relative to desktop websites.
Mobile conversions are about one third of the desktop conversions. If you wonder why this is the answer is pretty simple. Checking out collecting payment from the user is still rather messy. People often give up while filling the checkout form some checkout forms have improved since the beginning of web Commerce. What hasn’t changed is you still have to manually input the same information credit card billing address and shipping address? Our first step to solving this problem is autofill, because autofill works on existing forms.
You don’t have to modify your site. Autofill just works to help users check out faster autofill alone increases conversion rates by 25 %. Autofill does a good job of identifying form fields, but it’s not perfect. If you want an even better experience, you can have the autocomplete attribute to your forms. In this example, we’ve annotated the credit card portion of a form using values such as CC name and CC.
Number autofill will know exactly where to place its information. If you want to learn more about autocomplete attributes search the web, using what WG autofill to find the specification, autofill gets rid of the manual nature of data entry and makes it much simpler for the user. The current checkout experience presents you with a form to fill out every time for users, though the ideal experience would be that, when it’s time to buy they just buy site should be able to focus on creating an amazing and engaging shopping experience without worrying about optimizing.
A long checkout form this is where the payment request API comes in, we’re going to look at it first from a user perspective and then look at the code. What if we could do away with the form using web payments when it’s time to pay the user? Just pays payment request is a simple JavaScript API that helps the browser collect payment information. Then it’s a simple one: tap checkout for the user and an easy way for a site to receive a payment.
With the payment request API, you can make the whole process much faster and simpler and since the browser is actually taking care of collecting payment information from the user, we go from end taps to one tap. Let’s take a quick look at the code flow here. First, the site initiates a payment request in this request. The website passes to the browser the parameters of the payment, for example, how much is being charged and the available forms of payment? Don’t worry about the details now we’ll come back in a few minutes and look at this in detail.
The browser then determines the intersection of payment methods from the site and what the user has. It then presents a selection UI where the user chooses their method of payment. You get the UI by calling show this displays a native UI over the browser within this UI, the user can change how to pay the delivery method and the delivery address. The payment method can be credit cards or one of the apps that’s installed on their device, such as Android pay and, finally, the user taps on pay.
Then the browser requests a response from the selected payment method. This might be an app on your device or going directly to a payment provider. The payment processor verifies the request by examining its details and then returns the response directly to the server and the website now has all the information it needs to process the payment. Is this safe? The API is more secure than forum based payments.
The new payments are based on modern cryptography. You don’t need to enter payment data that could be logged or observed at the point of entry. Autofill is safe from website access and is typically stored. An encrypted storage on the hard drive to prevent disclosure, even when the OS is compromised payment request, is not just a chrome only API. The API is currently under development in the w3c web payments working group.
The goal is to create a universal cross browser standard for any website to accept any form of payment so to review payment requests, eliminates manual and tedious entry by storing the user’s information securely in the browser. The browser passes, addresses and credit card details immediately and securely to the site, and since the browser is collecting payment information from the user, we go from end taps to one tap: you’ve seen how payment request works for the user.
Now, let’s go over the code in more detail. First, a quick review. The site initiates a payment request in this request. The website passes to the browser the parameters of the payment, including the price and the payment methods accepted. The browser determines the intersection of payment methods for the site and the user and presents a selection. Ui payment can be anything from a simple credit card payment to a payment application installed on the user’s device.
The browser requests a response from the selected payment method and returns the response directly to the merchant. There are multiple code samples for this on: Google, Chrome, github, dot, io. Let’s start writing some code. Step 1 is to tell payment requests. All the ways you can get paid. Step 2 is to define the details about the actual transaction cost items, currency, shipping options and so on.
Here’s an example of how you would define shipping options notice. The selected bit you can include this: if you have multiple options, the browser will tell you which one the user selects step 3 is to define what information you want. The API to collect. Take the three data structures you just created and pass them to the payment request. Constructor. You often do this when the user indicates they’re ready to pay, take the request and call it show method.
This returns a promise and opens the user interface. The UI shows the details of the purchase and collects payment information when the user approves the prom resolves with a payment response object. Next, you should check that the payment is valid. Send the information to your payment processor for processing the UI will show a spinner while the request takes place when a request comes back, call complete to close the UI.
The complete method tells the user agent that the user interaction is over. The payment response object contains everything needed to submit a payment for credit card payments. The response is standardized for non credit card payments such as Android pay. The response will be documented by the provider. There’s one loose end to tie up what happens if the user changes their shipping address or options.
This may change the total cost and in some cases, may change the shipping options. Payment requests can omit shipping address, change and shipping option change events. You should add event. Listeners for these and update the payment details. Accordingly, the sample code will show you how and that’s it. You can find a full set of resource links on this final slide. You may have noticed. I didn’t mention a lab, we’re just finishing it up at the time of filming, so check your lab notebook for a complete ecommerce example.
Api is a w3c standard to eliminate payment forms for users and standardized payment collections for sites. It allows us to request payment and shipping information with a single API call.
This knows how to run Apple pay on iOS Safari and Google pay on Android. It’s not limited to those to any payment provider can write a plug-in. It’s not even restricted to one browser. It’s probably in the browser you’re using right now the browser simply acts as an intermediary collecting the information we need in a consistent way. Then returns a JSON object with the results that we can use to collect the payment.
If you have used a pay with Apple pay or pay with Google pay button in the browser, you already know what the experience will be, like developers previously used custom libraries to implement this, such as the Apple pay, API or the Google Wallet API, and if you Want to do that too great, but if you want to work with whatever payment system, the user has payment request. Is your friend, let’s take a quick look at the code flow and user experience? We want to buy this jacket, what happens when we tap buy now? This is an ordinary button with an ordinary event handler.
First, the site creates a payment request, object and populates it with some details. It typically has the price, a list of items being purchased and the available forms of payment. This is all invisible to the user. We need to trigger the payment user interface, you get the UI by calling payment request, dot, show this displays a native UI over the browser and returns a promise. The next few steps are all happening inside this promise.
The first screen is a summary of the information supplied by the app tapping on an item opens it the EPI stores, addresses and payment options securely. In this example, Larry can select his shipping address with one tap edit. The address or add another need to change. The shipping option no problem: it’s just kappa way note that changing this option may change the total price. The payment request api can handle this with a little help from your app notice, the multiple payment options, the api also handles country, specific payment methods and, finally, the user taps on pay.
At this point, the browser runs the selected payment service. This might be an app on your device or going across the network to a payment provider. The completed payment returns a special token that you can send to your server. The server has ways of verifying this token. Is this safe? The api is more secure than form based payments. The new payment instruments are based on modern cryptography. You don’t need to enter payment data that can be logged or observed at the point of entry, so to review payment requests, eliminates manual and tedious entry by storing the user’s information securely in the browser.
It works across browsers across OS platforms and can work with any payment service that wants to write just a little code now that you’ve seen how payment request works for the user, let me show you how to code it remember that the payment UI contains multiple sections. We need to populate these sections before making the request. The request needs at least three data structures, the payment options, the order, details and shipping options so we’ll create those then generate a payment request.
We will call show and get back a promise that resolves when it’s time to contact the payment processor, finally notice that we may want to or three event handlers. These are called while the UI is visible and can trigger updates when the user changes addresses or shipping options. Let’s walk through the steps in the UI and the corresponding code. First, the user taps by now. So we want to set up a payment request.
Remember that we need some data structures before we can create the request. The payment methods lists all the payment services that your site understands. It’s an array of payment method, objects and each method may have its own specific properties here. We’re listing the basic credit card method and Google pay note that I’m leaving out the details of the Google pay object as it’s pretty involved.
We want the user to know what they’re buying. This includes the core details of the transaction, how much money? What currency? And what list items you want displayed? Keep the line items fairly high level. It isn’t meant to be used as an itemized receipt. If you want more than one shipping option, you can define this structure notice, it’s a property on the transaction details. If you have multiple options include a selected bit, the browser will highlight the selected option and fire an event when it changes.
Now you can define what information you want from the API by default. Payment requests will only return the payment info if the user is logged. In you may have the rest of their information. If you need more these options, let you collect what you need. Take the data structures, you’ve just created and pass them to the payment request constructor. This should happen in response to a button tap or other user initiated action.
Now so far the screen hasn’t changed. We need to trigger the UI, take the payment request and call the show method. This returns a promise and opens the user interface notice. There’s a big block of code. After this, we still have a couple of steps until we’re done. The UI shows the details of the purchase and collects payment information when the user approves the promise resolves with a payment response object.
The payment response object contains everything needed to submit a payment for credit card payments. The response is standardized for non credit card payments such as Google pay. The response will be documented by the provider. Next, you should check that the payment is valid. Send the information to your payment processor for processing the UI will show a spinner while the request takes place. Okay.
So how do we remove the payment UI after we click payment? Even if it fails call payment response, not complete. You can include a message to the user. This tells the browser that the payment is complete and allows the app to notify the user of the result. Now, there’s one loose end to tie up what happens if the user changes their shipping address or options. This may change a total cost and, in some cases, may change a shipping options.
Payment requests can omit shipping, address, change, shipping, option, change and payment method change events. You should have event listeners for these and update details accordingly. Remember we’re making the update in the middle of a promise, just as we do installing the Service Worker, so we use a similar bit of code. We get the event and call update with on it. This takes a promise that resolves to a new transaction details record.
It’s not all that different from calling cache at all from the service workers install event that also returns its result via the event. The get new info method is something that you would write. It takes some data from the request and builds a new transaction details. Object. Here’s a reminder of what goes in the transaction details. Your code probably needs to copy from the old object to a new one.
We resolve the promise with the new details, update with then updates the payment request and the screen, and that’s it. You now have a seamless, easy to use checkout experience now that was a bit of a long example, but most of it is boilerplate check out the payment request. Samples at Google, Chrome, github, io, remember the process for easier payments starts with autofill. If you want more payment request, is there to help? You can also check out specific libraries for Apple pay, Google pay, Samsung pay and others they put up a pay with button on the screen.
They usually fall back to the payment request interface, but they may be an easier option for your users. The only way to know is to try them for yourself thanks for hanging in there through web payments. This is one of the most complex parts of building a PWA, yet it’s really satisfying and could be great for business. Take care and I’ll see you again soon.
Jimmy's Internet Marketing Business Blog 