Web delivery standard

A public page is the firm's shop window and, more and more, its sales channel: it is what a search engine ranks, what a messenger turns into a preview card, what a customer on a phone in a workshop waits for. The platform delivers it the way the professional content and commerce systems do — the document lean and saying what it is first, everything heavy an external versioned file a cache may keep, pictures sized and lazy, nothing third-party before the visitor asks for it — and it measures that on every deploy so the standard cannot quietly erode.

Nothing here is configured. It is how the web channel behaves for every firm, with the one accent colour a firm already sets.

The document

The page's own words come first. <title>, the description and the share card (Open Graph, Twitter) sit inside the first 8 KB of the document, ahead of every stylesheet and script.

The site's styling is an external, versioned, immutable file: the global sheet is hashed by the build and may live in every cache for a year; only a component's own few kilobytes of style stay inline, and no inline style block may exceed 8 KB. The Appearance cascade a firm edits reaches the web once, through its versioned stylesheet — the same cascade used to be inlined, serialised again into the page's hydration data, and linked.

The front page of a configured site stays under 100 KB uncompressed, and its hydration data (the page's own state, embedded for the browser) under 60 KB.

The interface catalogue is a file, not page data

The words the web shell itself says — search, pagers, the cart, the toolbar, the language menu — are translated from the same register as every other channel. Two things keep that light:

• the web asks only for its own words. The product's translatable strings are recorded with the channel whose code asks for them (a shipped manifest, modules/translation/channels.json, written by interface_translations --sync); the back office's and the ERP's strings never travel to a website. A string the manifest does not know passes through — the filter removes only what is provably somebody else's.
• the catalogue is an external, versioned, immutable address (/api/v1/translations?lang=sk&v=<stamp>), the way the reference commerce platform ships its per-locale translation file: the server renders the page with it and then leaves it out of the page's data; the browser fetches the same address before it takes over the page — once, then from its cache for a year. Every edit of a translation is a new stamp.

Media a browser may keep

A 304 is not a read: the read trail of customer-owned files counts people, not caches.

Pictures in text

An editor drops a picture into a body, a block or a product description and the reader gets it the way image styles deliver a listing picture:

• its intrinsic size (width, height) — the layout reserves the box before the bytes land, so nothing jumps;
• lazy past the first — the first picture of a text is the likely hero and loads at once; every following one waits for the scroll and decodes off the main thread. An author who writes loading="eager" or lazy on a picture is obeyed over that rule;
• a responsive WebP source set from three shipped image styles — responsive_480, responsive_960, responsive_1440 — for every rung narrower than the picture, plus one at the picture's real width (never upscaled), with the original as the fallback source;
• the authored alternative text, verbatim — never invented, dropped or altered. A picture without one is reported by the audit.

Animated pictures and vector marks get size and loading but no derivative (a derivative would drop the frames or the scalability). A picture that cannot be turned into a derivative is delivered as the original — once remembered, the failure is not retried on every view.

The three rungs are ordinary image styles (Structure → Image styles): an administrator who edits one changes every body picture with it; deleting one drops that rung.

A picture that entered the store before the platform measured sizes (or through a door that skipped it) is measured from its own bytes the first time a page delivers it, and the size is remembered — at most eight such pictures per page view, so one page never pays for a whole backlog.

A heavy placed map fetches its shapes

A map block with many or large shapes — a delivery firm's coverage zones, thousands of places from a view — carries no geometry in the page. The page names the block's own door, stamped by the block's last edit; the map asks it once the page stands and the browser keeps the answer for a year (a view-fed map, whose places change with content, five minutes). Up to 500 features or 8 KB of JSON stay inline. The same rule has applied to map views since the geo work of 245.

Embeds that wait for the reader

A hosted video (YouTube) renders as a still frame — the authored poster when the document has one, else a dark frame with the title and a play control. Nothing is fetched from the video host and no third-party cookie is set until the reader presses play (pointer, Enter or Space); then the player appears and starts, on the privacy-preserving host. A chapter link on the frame starts the player at that chapter. Without scripting the page shows the title, a link to the video and the outline — the content was there all along.

Nothing the visitor does not need

An anonymous visitor's page load asks for nothing only a signed-in person has: no toolbar identity check (it answered unauthorised on every page), no cart for a visitor with no session, no flag images for a language menu that is closed. The server sees whether the request carried a session and tells the page; a signed-in person and a visitor with a basket still get the toolbar and the cart exactly as before.

Colour and names, accessible by derivation

A firm sets one accent. Text and controls drawn in it use the nearest shade of the same hue that meets the AA minimum (4.5:1) — one shade for the light page, one for the dark page — derived by the platform. Surfaces (the hero band, the brand mark) keep the accent exactly.

Controls whose spoken name differs from what they show (the language switcher shows "English") are named so the spoken name contains the visible text.

The front page's description

A front page with no authored description (Meta tags → site defaults) says the firm's tagline (Appearance → Branding) as its description and share text, so a search result or a preview card never shows the bare address. Nothing is invented: no tagline, no description; an authored description always wins; a record page keeps its own words.

The audit

manage.py web_audit --url https://ctrl32.com [--page /download/ …] [--lighthouse report.json] [--json]

Fetches the front page (and any --page) anonymously and measures every budget; exit code 0 when all hold, 1 naming each breached budget, 2 when a page could not be fetched. The deploy runs it for every site after the containers are up and writes the report into the deploy log.

The browser-side budgets need a browser: run Lighthouse on a workstation and hand the JSON to --lighthouse.

Measured on the reference page

ctrl32.com front page, Lighthouse 13, simulated mobile.