Tags: webcomponents

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Monday, May 22nd, 2023

Building a Frontend Framework; Reactivity and Composability With Zero Dependencies

The thinking behind the minimal JavaScript framework, Strawberry:

Even without specialized syntax, you can do a lot of what the usual frontend framework does—with similar conciseness—just by using Proxy and WebComponents.

Thursday, October 20th, 2022

Why We’re Breaking Up with CSS-in-JS | Brad Frost

I’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth many times over my years building on the web. I too feel like there’s something in the air right now, and people are finally acknowledging that most single page apps are crap.

But Brad makes the interesting point that, because they were incubated when profligate client-side JavaScript was all the rage, web components may have ended up inheriting the wrong mindset:

So now the world of web components has egg on its face because the zeitgeist at the time of its design didn’t have such a strong focus on SSR/HTML-first/ progressive enhancement. Had web components been designed in the current zeitgeist, things would almost certainly be different.

Tuesday, October 4th, 2022

A Web Component Story

I get it. React feels good and it’s sticky. But all frameworks eventually fizzle out.

Thanks to Web Components, large companies are realizing you don’t need to rebuild buttons and other UI primitives every few years. Teams don’t need to argue about frameworks anymore. You can have your cake and eat it too!

I think this may be the best long-term argument for web components:

Any org that goes all in on a single framework will eventually find themselves swimming upstream to hire talent to maintain legacy code and avoid framework rot. But you can reduce this burden (and the associated costs) by using Web Components in your design system.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2022

Why I don’t miss React: a story about using the platform - Jack Franklin

This is a great case study of switching from a framework mindset to native browser technologies.

Though this is quite specific to Jack’s own situation, I do feel like there’s something in the air here. The native browser features are now powerful and stable enough to make the framework approach feel outdated.

And if you do want to use third-party dependencies, Jack makes a great case for choosing smaller single-responsibility helpers rather than monolithic frameworks.

Replacing lit-html would be an undertaking but much less so than replacing React: it’s used in our codebase purely for having our components (re)-render HTML. Replacing lit-html would still mean that we can keep our business logic, ultimately maintaining the value they provide to end-users. Lit-Html is one small Lego brick in our system, React (or Angular, or similar) is the entire box.

Wednesday, April 27th, 2022

Trust

I’ve noticed a strange mindset amongst front-end/full-stack developers. At least it seems strange to me. But maybe I’m the one with the strange mindset and everyone else knows something I don’t.

It’s to do with trust and suspicion.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m suspicious of third-party code and dependencies in general. Every dependency you add to a project is one more potential single point of failure. You have to trust that the strangers who wrote that code knew what they were doing. I’m still somewhat flabbergasted that developers regularly add dependencies—via npm or yarn or whatever—that then pull in even more dependencies, all while assuming good faith and competence on the part of every person involved.

It’s a touching expression of faith in your fellow humans, but I’m not keen on the idea of faith-based development.

I’m much more trusting of native browser features—HTML elements, CSS features, and JavaScript APIs. They’re not always perfect, but a lot of thought goes into their development. By the time they land in browsers, a whole lot of smart people have kicked the tyres and considered many different angles. As a bonus, I don’t need to install them. Even better, end users don’t need to install them.

And yet, the mindset I’ve noticed is that many developers are suspicious of browser features but trusting of third-party libraries.

When I write and talk about using service workers, I often come across scepticism from developers about writing the service worker code. “Is there a library I can use?” they ask. “Well, yes” I reply, “but then you’ve got to understand the library, and the time it takes you to do that could be spent understanding the native code.” So even though a library might not offer any new functionality—just a different idion—many developers are more likely to trust the third-party library than they are to trust the underlying code that the third-party library is abstracting!

Developers are more likely to trust, say, Bootstrap than they are to trust CSS grid or custom properties. Developers are more likely to trust React than they are to trust web components.

On the one hand, I get it. Bootstrap and React are very popular. That popularity speaks volumes. If lots of people use a technology, it must be a safe bet, right?

But if we’re talking about popularity, every single browser today ships with support for features like grid, custom properties, service workers and web components. No third-party framework can even come close to that install base.

And the fact that these technologies have shipped in stable browsers means they’re vetted. They’ve been through a rigourous testing phase. They’ve effectively got a seal of approval from each individual browser maker. To me, that seems like a much bigger signal of trustworthiness than the popularity of a third-party library or framework.

So I’m kind of confused by this prevalent mindset of trusting third-party code more than built-in browser features.

Is it because of the job market? When recruiters are looking for developers, their laundry list is usually third-party technologies: React, Vue, Bootstrap, etc. It’s rare to find a job ad that lists native browser technologies: flexbox, grid, service workers, web components.

I would love it if someone could explain why they avoid native browser features but use third-party code.

Until then, I shall remain perplexed.

Friday, April 22nd, 2022

Web Components as Progressive Enhancement - Cloud Four

This is exactly the pattern of usage I’ve been advocating for with web components—instead of creating a custom element from scratch, wrap an existing HTML element and use the custom element to turbo-charge it, like Zach is doing:

By enhancing native HTML instead of replacing it, we can provide a solid baseline experience, and add progressive enhancement as the cherry on top.

Wednesday, April 6th, 2022

Design Systems Aren’t Cheap

Just like jQuery dominated the front end yesterday, React dominates it today. There will be something new that dominates it tomorrow. Your design system team will continue doing the same work and incurring more and more costs to keep up with framework churn. And let’s not forget the cost of updating tomorrow’s legacy apps, who are consumers of your soon to be legacy design system.

Thursday, February 10th, 2022

Add Responsive-Friendly Enhancements to `details` with `details-utils`—zachleat.com

This is how a web component should be designed! Zach has made a custom element that wraps around an existing HTML element, turbocharging its powers. That’s the way to think about web components—as a progressive enhancement.

Tuesday, October 19th, 2021

HTML with Superpowers - daverupert.com

A great talk from Dave on web components:

I think if you were using Web Components before 2020 you were an early adopter and you probably have some scars to show for it. But in 2021, now that all modern browsers support Web Components, I think they’re worth investigating. They have one superpower that no other JavaScript framework offers called the Shadow DOM which is both powerful but frustrating. But another superpower — the power I’m most excited about — is that you can use them standalone without any frameworks, build tools, or package managers.

The talk makes a callback to my talk Building from a few years back. I like that. It feels like a long thoughtful converstation.

Tuesday, September 7th, 2021

Using the platform

Elise Hein documents what it was like to build a website (or web app, if you prefer) the stackless way:

  • use custom elements (for modular HTML without frameworks)
  • use the in-browser package manager (for JavaScript packages without build tools)
  • match pages with files (to avoid routing and simplify architecture)
  • stick to standards (to avoid obsolescence and framework fatigue)

Her conclusions are similar to my own: ES6 modules mean you can kiss your bundler goodbye; web components are a mixed bag—it’s frustrating that Apple are refusing to allow native elements to be extended. Interestingly, Elise feels that a CSS preprocessor is still needed for her because she wants to be able to nest selectors …but even that’s on its way now!

Perhaps we might get to the stage where it isn’t an automatic default to assume you’ll need bundling, concatenation, transpiling, preprocessing, and all those other tasks that we’ve become dependent on build tools for.

I have a special disdain for beginner JavaScript tutorials that have you run create-react-app as the first step, and this exercise has only strengthened my conviction that every beginner programmer should get to grips with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS before delving into frameworks. Features native to the web are what all frameworks share, and knowing the platform makes for a stronger foundation in the face of change.

Tuesday, July 6th, 2021

Tabs in HTML?

I’ve been having some really interesting chats with Brian about tabs, markup, progressive enhancement and accessibility. Here’s a braindump of his current thinking which is well worth perusing.

Monday, May 17th, 2021

Faster Integration with Web Components - Cloud Four

It’s good to hear stories like this—makes me feel like the slow-burn of the theoretical benefits of web components is starting to spark and flame up.

Sunday, May 16th, 2021

Container Queries in Web Components | Max Böck

The point of this post is to show how nicely container queries can play with web components, but I want to also point out how nice the design of the web component is here: instead of just using an empty custom element, Max uses progressive enhancement to elevate the markup within the custom element.

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

davatron5000/awesome-standalones

A curated list of awesome framework-agnostic standalone web components.

Monday, April 19th, 2021

Home · castastrophe/wc-theming-standards Wiki

I really like the idea of a shared convention for styling web components with custom properties—feels like BEM meets microformats.

Tuesday, April 6th, 2021

Open UI and implicit parent/child relationships in HTML – Eric Bailey

I remember discussing this with Tantek years ago:

There are a few elements who need to be placed inside of another specific element in order to function properly.

If I recall, he was considering writing “HTML: The Good Parts”.

Anyway, I can relate to what Eric is saying here about web components. My take is that web components give developers a power that previous only browser makers had. That’s very liberating, but it should come with a commensurate weight of responsibility. I fear that we will see this power wielded without sufficient responsibility.

Sunday, March 7th, 2021

How Web Components Are Used at GitHub and Salesforce – The New Stack

I’m very taken with Github’s tab-container element—this is exactly how I think web components should be designed!

Tuesday, December 15th, 2020

Ampvisory

I was very inspired by something Terence Eden wrote on his blog last year. A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting:

I don’t like AMP. I think that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive.

So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP.

Like Terence, I’m not a fan of Google AMP—my initially positive reaction to it soured over time as it became clear that Google were blackmailing publishers by privileging AMP pages in Google Search. But all I ever did was bitch and moan about it on my website. Terence actually did something.

So this year I put myself forward as a candidate for the AMP advisory committee. I have no idea how the election process works (or who does the voting) but thanks to whoever voted for me. I’m now a member of the AMP advisory committee. If you look at that blog post announcing the election results, you’ll see the brief blurb from everyone who was voted in. Most of them are positively bullish on AMP. Mine is not:

Jeremy Keith is a writer and web developer dedicated to an open web. He is concerned that AMP is being unfairly privileged by Google’s search engine instead of competing on its own merits.

The good news is that main beef with AMP is already being dealt with. I wanted exactly what Terence said:

My recommendation is that Google stop requiring that organisations use Google’s proprietary mark-up in order to benefit from Google’s promotion.

That’s happening as of May of this year. Just as well—the AMP advisory committee have absolutely zero influence on Google search. I’m not sure how much influence we have at all really.

This is an interesting time for AMP …whatever AMP is.

See, that’s been a problem with Google AMP from the start. There are multiple defintions of what AMP is. At the outset, it seemed pretty straightforward. AMP is a format. It has a doctype and rules that you have to meet in order to be “valid” AMP. Part of that ruleset involved eschewing HTML elements like img and video in favour of web components like amp-img and amp-video.

That messaging changed over time. We were told that AMP is the collection of web components. If that’s the case, then I have no problem at all with AMP. People are free to use the components or not. And if the project produces performant accessible web components, then that’s great!

But right now it’s not at all clear which AMP people are talking about, even in the advisory committee. When we discuss improving AMP, do we mean the individual components or the set of rules that qualify an AMP page being “valid”?

The use-case for AMP-the-format (as opposed to AMP-the-library-of-components) was pretty clear. If you were a publisher and you wanted to appear in the top stories carousel in Google search, you had to publish using AMP. Just using the components wasn’t enough. Your pages had to be validated as AMP-the-format.

That’s no longer the case. From May, pages that are fast enough will qualify for the top stories carousel. What will publishers do then? Will they still maintain separate AMP-the-format pages? Time will tell.

I suspect publishers will ditch AMP-the-format, although it probably won’t happen overnight. I don’t think anyone likes being blackmailed by a search engine:

An engineer at a major news publication who asked not to be named because the publisher had not authorized an interview said Google’s size is what led publishers to use AMP.

The pre-rendering (along with the lightning bolt) that happens for AMP pages in Google search might be a reason for publishers to maintain their separate AMP-the-format pages. But I suspect publishers don’t actually think the benefits of pre-rendering outweigh the costs: pre-rendered AMP-the-format pages are served from Google’s servers with a Google URL. If anything, I think that publishers will look forward to having the best of both worlds—having their pages appear in the top stories carousel, but not having their pages hijacked by Google’s so-called-cache.

Does AMP-the-format even have a future without Google search propping it up? I hope not. I think it would make everything much clearer if AMP-the-format went away, leaving AMP-the-collection-of-components. We’d finally see these components being evaluated on their own merits—usefulness, performance, accessibility—without unfair interference.

So my role on the advisory committee so far has been to push for clarification on what we’re supposed to be advising on.

I think it’s good that I’m on the advisory committee, although I imagine my opinions could easily be be dismissed given my public record of dissent. I may well be fooling myself though, like those people who go to work at Facebook and try to justify it by saying they can accomplish more from inside than outside (or whatever else they tell themselves to sleep at night).

The topic I’ve volunteered to help with is somewhat existential in nature: what even is AMP? I’m happy to spend some time on that. I think it’ll be good for everyone to try to get that sorted, regardless about how you feel about the AMP project.

I have no intention of giving any of my unpaid labour towards the actual components themselves. I know AMP is theoretically open source now, but let’s face it, it’ll always be perceived as a Google-led project so Google can pay people to work on it.

That said, I’ve also recently joined a web components community group that Lea instigated. Remember she wrote that great blog post recently about the failed promise of web components? I’m not sure how much I can contribute to the group (maybe some meta-advice on the nature of good design principles?) but at the very least I can serve as a bridge between the community group and the AMP advisory committee.

After all, AMP is a collection of web components. Maybe.

Thursday, September 24th, 2020

The failed promise of Web Components – Lea Verou

A spot-on summary of where we’ve ended up with web components.

Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers.

But then…

Somewhere along the way, the space got flooded by JS frameworks aficionados, who revel in complex APIs, overengineered build processes and dependency graphs that look like the roots of a banyan tree.

Alas, that’s true. Lea wonders how this can be fixed:

I’m not sure if this is a design issue, or a documentation issue.

I worry that is a cultural issue.

Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of npm flugelhorn, import clownshoes, build quux, all completely unapologetically because “here is my truckload of dependencies, yeah, what”.

Thursday, April 30th, 2020

Interactive Elements: A Strange Game

Just today I was discussing with Trys and Cassie why developers tend to create bespoke JavaScript-driven components rather than using the elements that browsers give us for free. It all comes down to the ability to style the user interface.

Here, Brian proposes a kind of minimum viable web component that handles logic like keyboard control and accessibility, but leaves the styling practically untouched. Check out his panel-set demo of a tabbed interface.

I really, really like the way that it wraps existing content. If the web component fails for any reason, the content is still available. So the web component is a progressive enhancement:

An experimental custom element that wraps plain-old HTML (view the source) and decorates function, keyboard handling, accessibility information.