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Rob Weychert

V7: Video Killed the Web Browser Star

An HTML odyssey

So I thought I knew as much as I needed to know about the HTML <video> element, and as usual, I was wrong. I knew I could specify a source file with a src attribute on either <video> or a nested <source> element. I knew what to expect from a bunch of other attributes, like autoplay, controls, loop, muted, and the obvious height and width. I knew the poster attribute gave me control over the video’s static preview image. And I knew that in the absence of poster, most browsers display the first frame of the video as a preview image.

One notable exception on that last bit is iOS Safari, which simply displays a transparent rectangle with a play button, a perplexing default that is useful to absolutely no one. The vast majority of my site’s hundreds of videos had no associated poster images, and I generally prefer not to negotiate with terrorists, so I found a workaround to force iOS Safari to behave in the same reasonable manner as other browsers: media fragments, which can specify the point in the video where the browser should begin playing. Tacking #t=0.001 to the end of the video’s src value tells the browser to start at the one-millisecond mark, which makes iOS Safari display the first frame as a preview image. Problem solved! Or at least that problem was solved. Another soon emerged.

I noticed that pages with multiple videos were loading slowly. It had long been my understanding that browsers initially loaded a video’s first frame, or maybe buffered the first few seconds, and didn’t load more until the user pressed play. Could it be that my assumption was wrong and the browser was just preloading the entire video? A quick test on PageSpeed Insights revealed to my great horror that indeed, my concert diary landing page, which at the time had 37 videos on it, weighed two hundred fifty-six megabytes. Yikes.

Consequently, I soon learned about the preload attribute, which lets you tell the browser how to load the video. A value of none means nothing from the video should be preloaded, a value of metadata indicates that only the metadata (like the video length) should be preloaded, and a value of auto means the entire video file should be preloaded. metadata is the spec’s recommended default, but apparently different browsers have different defaults, so results vary across browsers if you’re not intentional about a preload value.

OK, fine, preload="metadata" seemed to be what I was looking for. Problem solved! Except it wasn’t. The page weight remained the same, with multiple browsers apparently interpreting preload="metadata" exactly the same as preload="auto", which was a frustrating thing to discover for a person who believes words mean things. After testing different values across browsers, as far as I can tell, the only way to be sure no browsers will take it upon themselves to preload your entire big-ass video file is to use preload="none", which sounds fine until you learn that means not only that iOS Safari is right back where we started, but every other browser has joined its no-preview-without-poster crusade.

Let’s recap:

  1. iOS Safari won’t show a video preview image without a poster attribute,
  2. unless you force its hand by adding a media fragment like #t=0.001 to the end of the video’s src;
  3. meanwhile, the only thing that will stop iOS Safari and other browsers from preloading the entire video file is preload="none",
  4. which obliterates not only the iOS Safari preview images enabled by the media fragment hack, but preview images in all other browsers as well.

The moral of the story is: Browsers are not smart about video and will force you to go to an unreasonable amount of trouble to get reasonable results, which is how, after beginning this journey by trying to avoid generating nearly 400 poster images, I ended up having to generate nearly 400 poster images.

Someone more clever than I would have approached this task by finding a way to add a batch process to an FFmpeg workflow, but I opted instead to spend a few hours in a hospital waiting room dragging the video files one-by-one into the Video Thumbnail Generator web app, made by a kind soul known only as Curtis, who in the end is this story’s only hero.

All posts in this series

V7: Introduction

Redesigning my site in public

Welcome to RobWeychert.com V7! There are a number of new things I want to try with my site, from structure to aesthetics to code, and so it’s time to begin a fresh redesign. Inspired by my friends Jonnie and Frank, I’ve decided to do it in public from the ground up. I’m starting with bare-bones HTML and as the design process unfolds, each step will be reflected on the site in real time and documented… See more →

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V7: The “viewport” meta tag

Apparently it is still necessary!

The first thing I did when setting up this new version of my site was to put together some minimum viable HTML templates. Here’s the blog post template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title><!--POST TITLE--> | RobWeychert.com V7</title>
    <meta name="description" content="<!--POST DESCRIPTION-->" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RobWeychert.com V7" href="/index.rss"/>
  </head>

  <body>
    <… See more →
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V7: Content priorities

Making my projects more visible

I added a tiny bit of CSS to aid readability by keeping line lengths in check on larger viewports:

body {
  margin: 0 auto;
  max-width: 75ch;
  padding: 1rem;
}

When calling the CSS file from the page head, I include a query string based on today’s date, which I’ll update when the CSS is updated. This will let updates get past the browser’s cache.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/main.css?20200108" />

Hopefully this small stylistic addition will keep things tidy enough until I properly begin the visual… See more →

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V7: Structural challenges

The ambitous scope of the timeline section

Most of this redesign’s structural challenges pertain to the timeline section, previously described thusly:

  • Timeline: The blog on the current version of my site, V6, collects most of what I’ve written for public consumption since 2001 across nearly 40 different sources. I’d like to expand that to include even more sources and content types, collecting virtually everything I’ve shared online in one sprawling, sortable/filterable timeline.

Since the projects section is a higher priority and the new… See more →

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V7: Timeline section inventory

Untangling the content

Progress on the redesign has slowed, partly because I’ve been busy with other things, and partly because, frankly, the open questions about the timeline section enumerated in my previous post are an intimidating mess, a perfect example of the early stages of the Design Squiggle.

In a fight or flight situation like this, here are the arguments for flight:

  • “Uh, the timeline isn’t even your top priority for the site, remember? What’s more important: working on… See more →
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V7: The timeline is taking shape

Making progress with sketches, wireframes, and a prototype

Though it’s mostly taken place in scattered, stolen moments, I’ve made a lot of progress on the UX of the timeline section, much of which was still a disconcerting mystery not so long ago.

With the help of the data categories and content inventory I established in the previous post, I’ve settled on a binary timeline concept: each post is either small or large. Small posts consist of up to 100 words and/or up to… See more →

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V7: On dependency

How I incorporate other people’s work into my own—and how I don’t

I might have expected quarantine life to be a boon to my site’s redesign process since most of my preferred social distractions were nullified. Instead, I’ve been using the time in isolation to make music videos, finalize a home purchase, move into said home, and try to find my place in our national reckoning on racism and public safety reform. But as I slowly shift some of my attention back to the redesign, I’ve been… See more →

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V7: Choosing a CMS

Do my new content requirements need a new content management system?

For awhile, I had basically resigned myself to the idea that the massive amount of stray content I’m planning to bring home (thousands of tweets, Flickr photos, etc) would necessitate moving my site onto a LAMP stack CMS. I started poking around in WordPress, which I hadn’t touched in years, and Craft, which I use regularly in my work at ProPublica. The former felt bloated and the latter’s setup presumed a level of back-end know-how… See more →

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V7: Beginning data migration

Prepping hundreds of tiny blog posts for republishing

Apropos of nothing, I decided that the first of the old entries I’d bring over to V7 would be granular ones:

  • Daily Haiku: A section of the fourth version of my site, beginning back in 2005. As the name suggests, I wrote a haiku every weekday based on the Dictionary.com Word of the Day. Each haiku was originally its own entry, but when I brought them over to V6 a few years ago, I consolidated… See more →
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V7: Renewed purpose

Goodbye, Twitter

It’s been nearly two years since I posted an update on this project! I’ve been moving it forward slowly and quietly since then, and I’ll share some details about those activities in due time, as well as details about how work and life changes have introduced new and different demands on my time and somewhat expanded the scope of the site. But for now, the most important takeaway is that my fundamental vision for V7… See more →

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V7: The Procrastination Destination

Working on my site instead of yours

I’ve given my V7 redesign project the unofficial tagline “The Procrastination Destination” since the significant progress it’s seen in the past few months has come mostly in stolen moments, some of which turned into extremely productive (and perhaps troublingly obsessive) deep dives. This recent movement has been pretty non-linear, and the tasks in play are all interdependent enough that none of them are really done until all of them are, but I seem to be… See more →

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V7: Eleventy it is

Switching static site generators

Every static site generator has idiosyncrasies, and Eleventy is no different. As is the case pretty much any time I try out software, I find that Eleventy often does things differently than I think it ought to, and it doesn’t always make itself as clear as I think it could. A couple of examples:

  • Eleventy has no built-in mechanism for date-based archives. A common blogging convention I’ve adhered to for many years involves organizing post… See more →
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V7: Expanding scope

Bringing more data and functionality into the mix

In my previous post, I mentioned Tinnitus Tracker, my standalone concert diary site which can be browsed by genre, artist, venue, city, state, and year. I had been planning to continue updating that site concurrently with V7, but it recently occurred to me that it makes a lot more sense to just consolidate the two sites, which in hindsight seems incredibly obvious.

For one thing, I’ve never been satisfied with the Tinnitus Tracker design, and… See more →

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V7: Metadata structure and sitemap

Solidifying the information architecture

I’ve been revising a metadata structure for blog posts and a sitemap for a few months now, and since I haven’t felt the need to tweak either of them in awhile, they’re probably solid enough to document here.

Metadata structure

The blog post metadata has been developed to accommodate a wide variety of post types, to give me a lot of flexibility in how to present them, and to give users a lot of options… See more →

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V7: The Great Data Migration

Bringing it all home

I’ve done a lot of work on the site in the last two months, and a launch date, while still a ways off, is finally coming into focus. I’ve been working on this redesign very intermittently for over four years now, but at this point I expect to keep at it until it’s done, with as little interruption as possible.

Among other recent advances, I’ve moved the site from Jekyll to Eleventy, chosen a font… See more →

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V7: The Great Data Migration, Part 2

Once more, with feeling

From the beginning, it was clear that data migration was going to be this redesign’s biggest, most cumbersome task, as the site was growing from 600-some blog posts to untold thousands. I assumed that reformatting the mountain of data arriving in disparate configurations from over a dozen external sources (as described in my previous post) would be the lion’s share of the work, and it would be smooth sailing from there. How wrong I was!… See more →

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V7: Launch day

Expanded site, new design, same me

I started redesigning this site in January of 2020. Remember January of 2020? We didn’t know we were living in the Before Times. There were still a few people in the White House who weren’t Fox News hosts or meme coin shills or raw milk evangelists. Our tech bro billionaires hadn’t yet entered the endgame of their persistent campaign to annihilate whatever sense of objective reality we once shared. We were so young.

I wouldn’t… See more →

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V7: Video Killed the Web Browser Star

An HTML odyssey

So I thought I knew as much as I needed to know about the HTML <video> element, and as usual, I was wrong. I knew I could specify a source file with a src attribute on either <video> or a nested <source> element. I knew what to expect from a bunch of other attributes, like autoplay, controls, loop, muted, and the obvious height and width. I knew the poster attribute gave me control over the… See more →

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