You can use Web Components without the shadow DOM
So what are the advantages of the Custom Elements API if you’re not going to use the Shadow DOM alongside it?
- Obvious Markup
- Instantiation is More Consistent
- They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly
Link tags: custom
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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.
Request for developer feedback: customizable select | Blog | Chrome for Developers
I’m very glad to see that work has moved away from a separate selectmenu element to instead enhancing the existing select element—I could never see an upgrade path for selectmenu, but now there are plenty of opportunities for progressive enhancement.
HTML Web Components Can Have a Little Shadow DOM, As A Treat | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer
This is an interesting thought from Scott: using Shadow DOM in HTML web components but only as a way of providing sort-of user-agent styles:
providing some default, low-specificity styles for our slotted light-dom HTML elements while allowing them to be easily overridden.
But what about the shadow DOM? | Go Make Things
So many of the problems and challenges of working with Web Components just fall away when you ditch the shadow DOM and use them as a light wrapper for progressive enhancement.
Web Components from early 2024 · Chris Burnell
Some lovely HTML web components—perfect for progressive enhancement!
Custom Element Naming | BitWorking
More thoughts on naming web components.
PodRocket - A web development podcast from LogRocket: HTML web components with Chris Ferdinandi
I somehow missed this when it came out in January but Amber just pointed me to it—an interview with Chris about HTML web components, available for your huffduffing pleasure.
A microdata enhanced HTML Webcomponent for Leaflet | k-nut — Blog
Here’s a nice HTML web component that uses structured data in the markup to populate a Leaflet map.
Personally I’d probably use microformats rather than microdata, but the princple is the same: progressive enhancement from plain old HTML to an interactive map.
Retrofitting fluid typography | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
Here’s a taste of what Rich will be delivering at Patterns Day on Thursday—can’t wait!
daviddarnes/play-button: A Web Component to play audio or video with a button
Isn’t this a lovely little HTML web component? All it does is hook up a button element with an audio or video element: exactly the kind of discrete drudge work that’s good to automate away.
Offloading JavaScript With Custom Properties: HeydonWorks
With classes, we can send CSS static values but with custom properties we can send dynamic ones, which is a major shift in the way we can style state. This is something that has been true for some time—and is extremely well supported—but sometimes it takes solving a small real-world problem to make you appreciate the value of it.
I think we still haven’t come to fully appreciate the superpower of custom properties: dynamic values that are shared between CSS and JavaScript.
drab
This looks like a handy collection of HTML web components for common interface patterns.
drab does not use the shadow DOM, so you can style content within these elements as usual with CSS.
HTML Web Components on the Server Are Great | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer
Scott has written a perfect description of HTML web components:
They are custom elements that
- are not empty, and instead contain functional HTML from the start,
- receive some amount of progressive enhancement using the Web Components JavaScript lifecycle, and
- do not rely on that JavaScript to run for their basic content or functionality.
These are my jams · Paul Robert Lloyd
I like how Paul has recreated his own version of This Is My Jam and I really like how he’s done it with an HTML web component.
Light-DOM-Only Web Components are Sweet – Frontend Masters Boost
The main reason I’m so hot on Light DOM is that I find the styling story of Web Components using Shadow DOM annoying.
An Image Dialog Web Component
Here’s an HTML web component that uses progressive enhancement for a very common use case: clicking a thumbnail image to view the full size image in an overlay. Just be sure to update the code to include an alt attribute before using this in production!
Extending Responsive Video with HTML Web Components | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer
Scott gives a thorough step-by-step walkthrough of building an HTML web component, in this case for responsive video:
In this post, I’m going to talk briefly about responsive video, but most of the post will be about using HTML web components to extend native video behavior in very helpful ways. But even if you’re not particularly interested in video development, stick around as I’ll demonstrate how to build an HTML Web Component to progressively enhance anything you need.
HTML Web Components Are Having a Moment – Cloud Four
I suspect that in a few years’ time, we’ll look back at this month, and especially Jeremy and Eric’s articles as an inflection point. Similar to how Ethan managed to make responsive web design accessible to more people, I think we’re looking at the same thing happening right now for web components.
A great summary (with links) of all the recent buzz around HTML web components:
I don’t know about you, but I read every one of those articles, and for the first time, web components “clicked” for me. Suddenly, I understood how they could fit into our workflow, and where they’d be a good addition. I was excited about web components in a way I’d never been before.