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Rick Viscomi for HTTP Archive

Posted on • Updated on

Join the Web Almanac project!

The Web Almanac is live at https://almanac.httparchive.org!

I'm really excited to share what I've been working on lately. It's called the Web Almanac.

The goal is to combine the stats and trends of HTTP Archive's web transparency dataset with the expertise of the web community to create an annual report of the state of the web. You can think of it like an annually curated ebook filled with interesting insights written by your favorite experts. The project is on schedule to be released in November later this year.

As of now we have about 50 volunteers from the web community working on it, brainstorming content and building the experience. They've collaboratively come up with 20 chapters' worth of content:

Section Chapter
I. Page Content 1. JavaScript
I. Page Content 2. CSS
I. Page Content 3. Markup
I. Page Content 4. Media
I. Page Content 5. Third Parties
I. Page Content 6. Fonts
II. User Experience 7. Performance
II. User Experience 8. Security
II. User Experience 9. Accessibility
II. User Experience 10. SEO
II. User Experience 11. PWA
II. User Experience 12. Mobile web
III. Content Publishing 13. Ecommerce
III. Content Publishing 14. CMS
IV. Content Distribution 15. Compression
IV. Content Distribution 16. Caching
IV. Content Distribution 17. CDN
IV. Content Distribution 18. Page Weight
IV. Content Distribution 19. Priority Hints
IV. Content Distribution 20. HTTP/2

For example, in Chapter 5. Third Parties, author Patrick Hulce is exploring things like: how many bytes are loaded by ads? who are the most popular analytics providers? how much time do ads take to execute JS?

As of now (late May) we're in the process of finalizing each chapter's authors, peer reviewers, and metrics. If any of these topics interest you, now is a great time to get involved. Feel free to follow the links to each chapter's GitHub issue where you can see who the authors are, sign up to contribute, or suggest ideas.

We also have roles available for data analysts to extract the insights from HTTP Archive's BigQuery dataset and web developers/designers to help build the UX of the Almanac.

I'm super excited to see this come to life and share it with everyone soon. Meanwhile, we'd love to have more contributors sharing their diverse experiences and helping to raise the quality of the report!

Top comments (5)

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gustavofsantos profile image
Gustavo Santos

I'm very happy to see the community doing such thing ❀️

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Agreed!

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doderbolz profile image
d-oderbolz • Edited

Great Initiative, I am looking forward to the Almanac!
I wondered if you planned to include security (e.g. https vs. http)?

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rick_viscomi profile image
Rick Viscomi

Thanks! Yes we've got an entire chapter dedicated to security including HTTPS: github.com/HTTPArchive/almanac.htt...

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davekarow profile image
Dave Karow

Great stuff! Helping people understand and SEE the impact of content, configuration and distribution strategies by bringing real world data to life is not only cool, but much needed. A big yes!