Custom Element Naming | BitWorking

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.

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”.

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.

Battling BEM – 5 common problems and how to avoid them

We tend to use a variant of BEM in our CSS at Clearleft. Glad to see that when we’ve hit these issues, we’ve taken the same approach.

Liskov’s Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components – Baldur Bjarnason

React has become a bloated carcass of false promises, misleading claims, and unending layers of backwards compatibility – the wrong kind of backwards compatibility, as they still occasionally break your fucking code when updating.

Pretty much anything else is a better tool for pretty much any web development task.