Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

> When I first heard someone talking about "Progressive Web Apps" I thought they were talking about "Progressive Enhancement"

Progressive enhancement is indeed where the P in PWA comes from. The core idea is to ship great sites for all users, and progressively upgrade with the latest web capabilities (service workers for offline, manifest for adding to homescreen and full-screen displays, and so on) when a user's device supports it. If the user's device doesn't support it, they should still get a good, traditional web experience: fast, secure, usable.

> Turns out doing a PWA is just basically about using the "Service Workers" API [2] and the practices around that.

Your first impression about progressive enhancement was closer to the mark. The PWA Checklist [1] is the canonical document about what constitutes a PWA. We created that doc in November 2016 [2] to try to clear up the massive confusion about the definition of a PWA, but apparently to no avail.

Under the "Baseline PWA" checklist you'll notice that there's mention of service workers and manifest files, but there's also mention of loading fast on 3G, having mobile-friendly design, being secure, supporting all browsers, and so on. Again, the core idea is to ship good experiences for all users, and progressively enhance the UX when possible.

It'd be an interesting postmortem to study why the "PWA" term has been so notoriously confusing. IMO part of the problem was that we as a team weren't 100% crystal-clear on the definition at the start. But to be fair, I think we did straighten out our messaging pretty early on. The PWA Checklist that I linked to which has been out since November 2016 is evidence of this. But by that time it was already too late. PWA became a buzzword, and the blogging community seemed to conflate "PWA" with "promising new web platform capabilities" (service workers and manifests). I don't mean to shift blame. We (Web DevRel) most likely caused that conflation. I think the takeaway is that this is a lesson on what can happen when you're not 100% clear on messaging right from the start.

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/check...

[2] https://github.com/google/WebFundamentals/commits/master/src...

  data:text/html,Screen LightScreen Light
Turn your screen into a light source
Tap to toggle
Source

this is well known in the prius chat boards.

Toyota also knew about it, but instead of making it a safety recall, they put out a service bulletin: T-SB-0172-09 Combination Meter - Intermittent Display

If you search the web for that you will find a ton of hits.

The solution is to replace the entire instrument cluster circuit board. If you have a replacement board, It's relatively easy, maybe an hour of work if you are handy, and there is no soldering unless you have no replacement and want to replace the bad capacitor yourself, and maybe a transistor. You will probably break your A/C vents in the process because they are made of a type of plastic that becomes extremely brittle with age.

There is a guy in Texas, Texas Hybrid Batteries, who will sell you a refurbished dash circuit board for $150 if you mail him yours. Buying a new one is a bit spendy and may require going through a dealer depending on laws, since the odometer is part of the assembly and has to be 'flashed' to what your vehicle was before the swap. However on cars of this age the odometer is often up to about 200,000 miles and exempt from a lot of the odometer laws.

I think you missed the point of my comment entirely.

Knowing your speed is not required to be safe while driving - being observant, correctly signaling, and driving at a speed appropriate for the conditions are.