Extensible Web Summit Berlin 2014: my lightning talk on Web Components | soledad penadés

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.

Toast

Chris describes exactly why I wrote about toast:

But we should be extra watchful about stuff like this. If any browser goes rogue and just starts shipping stuff, web standards is over. Life for devs gets a lot harder and the web gets a lot worse. The stakes are high. And it’s not going to happen overnight, it’s going to happen with little tiny things like this. Keep that blue beanie on.

Create a MarkDown tag - JSFiddle

This is nice example of a web component that degrades gracefully—if custom elements aren’t supported, you still get the markdown content, just not converted to HTML.

<ah-markdown>
## Render some markdown!
</ah-markdown>

Web Components and progressive enhancement - Adam Onishi

Adam and I share the same hopes and frustrations with web components. They can be written in a resilient, layered way that allows for progressive enhancement, but just about every example out there demonstrates a “my way or the highway” approach to using them.

We were chatting about this in the Design Systems slack channel, and it helped clarify some of my thoughts. I’ll try to poop out a blog post about this soon.

shawnbot/custom-elements: All about HTML Custom Elements

A good introduction to custom elements, one piece of the web components stack.

That said, when using custom elements—or anything involving JavaScript, for that matter—you should always design experiences for progressive enhancement, and plan for the possibility that JavaScript isn’t enabled or available.

Hmmm …that’s kind of hard when JavaScript is required to make custom elements work at all.