I love, love, love all the little details of HTML that Aaron offers up here. And I really like how he positions non-visual user-agents like searchbots, screen readers, and voice assisants as headless UIs.
HTML is a truly robust and expressive language that is often overlooked and undervalued, but it has the incredible potential to nurture conversations with our users without requiring a lot of effort on our part. Simply taking the time to code web pages well will enable our sites to speak to our customers like they speak to each other. Thinking about how our sites are experienced as headless interfaces now will set the stage for more natural interactions between the real world and the digital one.
This really gets to the heart of one of the biggest benefits of HTML web components: composability. You can nest your regular markup inside multiple custom elements; something that is can’t do.
The other exciting approach doesn’t exist yet: custom attributes. Again, they’d be a great way of using composability to turbo-charge your existing HTML in all sorts of ways.
This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?
I’m slapping my forehead—progressive web components is a perfect name for what I’ve been calling HTML web components. Why didn’t I think of that?
A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating.
This is a clever technique for a CSS/HTML only way of just-in-time loading of iframes using details and summary.
An excellent example of an HTML web component from Eric:
Extend HTML to do things automatically!
He layers on the functionality and styling, considering potential gotchas at every stage. This is resilient web design in action.
Some handy tips courtesy of Chris Ferdinandi.
Turning accessibility awareness into action with HTML.
HTML’s new `command` attribute on the `button` element could be a game-changer.
Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
You might want to use `display: contents` …maybe.