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.
Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:
I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.
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.
Call it HTMLX or call it Hijax, what matters isn’t the code so much as the idea:
Front-end JavaScript fatigue is real. I’m guilty myself of over-engineering JS UI despite preferring good old server templates. I don’t even think HTMX is that good but the philosophy behind it embarrasses the modern JavaScript developer. For that I appreciate it very much.
If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.
Lots of new features landing in Safari, and it’s worth paying attention to the new icon requirements now that websites can be added to the dock:
To provide the best user experience on macOS, supply at least one opaque, full-bleed
maskablesquare icon in the web app manifest, either as SVG (any size) or high resolution bitmap (1024×1024).
Minimum viable television and minimum viable websites.
The reality of unevenly-distributed browser features isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
From buttons to links.
Using ARIA attributes to power JavaScript functionality.
There are many ways to style a cat.