Icon Strategies Beyond Font Icons
Erwin Hofman explains why he abandoned icon fonts for an SVG-based approach using the <use> technique. The article details the migration strategy and the reasoning behind the move. For many projects, however, inlining the <svg> directly into the HTML remains a simple, effective option—treating it like any other HTML partial keeps things straightforward and performant.
Pushing Next.js Performance Further
Ben Schwarz’s piece acknowledges that Next.js handles much of the heavy lifting for React performance, but leaves the rest to developers. The framework offers practical tools to close that gap: dynamic component loading, script deferral, image optimization, and other performance-oriented helpers that let teams tune their apps without fighting the framework.
Redirect Liquidation
Tim Vereecke documents a clever technique: instead of redirecting an old URL, let it load, fetch the new content dynamically, and then use history.replaceState to swap the URL in the browser. This approach avoids a redirect round-trip for humans—though it’s not suitable for crawlers and bots.
A/B Testing at the Edge
Philip Walton outlines how Cloudflare Workers make A/B testing viable on static sites by manipulating HTML at the edge before it reaches the browser—conceptually like a Service Worker, but server-side. Users are assigned to groups via cookies, preserving their experience and avoiding client-side flicker.
Defining Web Performance
Alex Russell takes on the challenge of defining web performance in response to Tanner Hodges’ call for a formal foundation. The piece moves beyond arguing about specific metrics and instead tackles the discipline’s guiding principles: what it means to practice performance engineering and how to approach it systematically.
Caching Header Best Practices
Simon Hearne presents a thorough examination of caching header configuration. Getting these headers wrong means forcing browsers to repeatedly re-download unchanged assets—a costly mistake. The write-up covers how header behavior has evolved as the web’s caching semantics change, and what teams should send today.
