Link tags: extensible

Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit • Lea Verou

I love, love, love the deep thinking that Lea has put into this, really digging into the guts of what design does.

Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently and is a hallmark of poor design. Eigensolutions are the opposite: solutions that generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases. Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability.

Lea ties this into web standards too. It’s really helped clarify for me why I want more declarative options for common use cases (like a share button)—it’s about raising the ceiling without raising the floor.

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.

Building an extensible app or library with vanilla JS | Go Make Things

This looks like a sensible approach to creating a modular architecture for a complex client-side JavaScript codebase.

I know a lot of people swear by ES6 imports, but this systems worked really well for us. It gave us a simple, modular, extensible framework we can easily build on in the future.

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>

Shadow DOM v1: self-contained web components | Web Fundamentals - Google Developers

An in-depth look at the current Shadow DOM spec. It’s well-written but I don’t think this will really click with me until I start playing around with it for myself.

It’s good to see that the examples have some thought given to fallback content.

There’s also a corresponding tutorial on custom elements

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.

Surma.link – New ways to make your web app jank with Houdini – An introduction

This is a really good primer on all the pieces that make up the Houdini approach to CSS—giving authors access to low-level APIs for rendering.

As is often repeated here, it’s still early days and caution is advised, but it’s still a good idea to wrap your head around what’s coming down the standards pipe.

There’s even more specs in Houdini’s list of drafts, but the future of those is rather uncertain and they are not much more than a placeholder for an idea at this point. Examples include custom overflow behaviors, CSS syntax extension API, extension of native scroll behavior and similar ambitious things that allow you to screw up your web app even worse than ever before. Rejoice!

Practical Questions around Web Components - Ian Feather

An in-depth look at where web components stand today, together with some very good questions about where they might be heading tomorrow.

How GitHub is using Web Components in production — WebComponents.org

With all my talk about extending existing elements instead of making new ones, I was reminded of one of my favourite examples of custom elements in action: Github’s extensions of the time element.

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

Soledad Penadés also went to the Extensible Web Summit in Berlin, where she gave a lightning talk. Sounds like it was really good.

This also includes some good advice that, again, Alex might want to consider before denouncing any disagreement on Web Components as “piffle and tosh”:

If the W3C, or any other standardisation organisation wants to attract “normal” developers to get more diverse inputs, they/we should start by being respectful to everyone. Don’t try to show everyone how superclever you are. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t scare people away, because then only the loud ones stay, and the quieter shy people, or people who have more urgent matters to attend (such as, you know, having a working business website even if it’s not using the latest and greatest API) will just leave.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Reflections on Extensible Web Summit, Berlin

Bruce went to the Extensible Web Summit in Berlin and wrote up his notes.

Sounds like he shares my excitement, but also my nervousness.

I’m not yet entirely convinced that we’re not heralding a new era of JavaScript-only web development. I don’t want to see the fossilisation of the declarative web and a new Programmer Priesthood (re-)emerge.

There’s also this important point, that Alex would do well to remember before crying “Piffle and tosh!”:

We need to ensure that all devs who want to can participate by allowing ease of collaboration, courteous discourse.

Notes on notes (of smart people) about web components

Steve Faulkner responds to Alex’s response to my post about Web Components.

Steve shares my concerns …but he still refers to my post as “piffle”.

I can’t win.

Uncomfortably Excited – Infrequently Noted

Alex’s response to my post about Web Components, in which he ignores my excitement and dismisses my concerns as “piffle and tosh.”

I gotta say: I think cautious optimism and nervous excitement are healthy attitudes to have about any technology. For Alex to dismiss them so summarily makes me even more worried. Apparently you’re either with Web Components or you’re against them. Heaven forbid that you might voice any doubts or suggest any grey areas.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Notes on accessibility of Web Components

Bruce’s thoughts on ensuring accessibility in Web Components. He thinks that the vocabulary of ARIA is up to the job, so that’s good enough for me.

Section for peer-reviewed Custom Elements · Issue

Some sensible thoughts from Addy on how Web Components might be peer-reviewed.

Aerotwist - Web Components and the Three Unsexy Pillars

A healthy dose of scepticism about Web Components, looking at them through the lenses of accessibility, security, and performance.

I share some of this concern: Web Components might look like handy ready-made out-of-the-box solutions, but the truth is that web developers have to do much more of the hard graft that was traditionally left to the browser.

Laying The Groundwork For Extensibility—Smashing Coding

The authors of the Extensible Web Manifesto explain the thinking behind their …uh… thinking.

There’s a lot to like here, with some practical examples of where we’ve seen a disconnect between JavaScript APIs and declarative HTML (looking at you, Geolocation).

The Extensible Web Manifesto

An intriguing initiative to tighten up the loop between standards development and implementation.