Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.
Trys describes exactly the situation where you really do need to use the Shadow DOM in a web component—as opposed to just sticking to HTML web components—, and that’s when the component is going to be distributed and you have no idea where:
This component needed to be incredibly portable, looking great on any third-party website, in any position, at any viewport, with any amount of content. It had to be a “hyper-responsive” component.
“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”
Why were they slow? The answer: React.
“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”
This is a good description of the appeal of HTML web components:
WC lifecycles are crazy simple: you register the component with
customElements.defineand it’s off to the races. Just write a class and the browser will take care of elements appearing and disappearing for you, regardless of whether they came from a full reload, a fetch request, or—god forbid—adocument.write. The syntax looks great in markup, too: no more having to decorate withjs-somethingclasses or data attributes, you just wrap your shit in a custom element calledsomething-controllerand everyone can see what you’re up to. Since I’m firmly in camp “progressively enhance or go home” this fits me like a glove, and I also have great hopes for Web Components improving the poor state of pulling in epic dependencies like date pickers or text editors.
The power of interoperability:
Web components won’t take web development by storm, or show us the One True Way to build websites. They don’t need to dethrone JavaScript frameworks. We probably won’t even all learn how to write them!
What web components will do — at least, I hope — is let us collectively build a rich ecosystem of dynamic components that work with any web stack. No more silos. That’s the web component success story.
Why the heck is everyone reaching for React as soon as something on the screen needs to update? And why do we insist on squishing our frontend concerns together with our backend concerns?
I’m glad I’m not the only one constantly asking myself those questions.
Look: is the idea of physically separating “code that runs business logic and builds markup” from “code that handles realtime interactions” really that awful? You can write both in JS if you like, I promise I won’t judge, but we can’t keep pretending that they’re basically the same.
Trying to understand a different mindset to mine.
Responses to my thoughts on why developers would trust third-party code more than a native browser feature.
Abstracting common interaction patterns as a starting point for accessible components.
The Google developer relations team are dishing out some inconvenient truths.
The reality of unevenly-distributed browser features isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.