You just take some normal HTML markup, wrap it with a custom element, and then write some JS to add capabilities which you can then style with regular CSS! Everything’s of the Light Side of the Web. No need to pierce the Vale of Shadows or whatever.
I think Eric’s approach here should be the default for most web components: you probably don’t need to mess around with the shadow DOM, and you should definitely be wrapping your web component around existing HTML instead of witing opening and closing tags with nothing in between.
Augment, don’t replace.
Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins
I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.
I hold this truth to be self-evident: the larger the abstraction layer a web developer uses on top of web standards, the shorter the shelf life of their codebase becomes, and the more they will feel the churn.
“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”
Why were they slow? The answer: React.
“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”
Here’s the inside scoop on why Github is making a bizarre move from working web components to a legacy React stack.
Most of what I heard in favor of React was a) it’s got a good DX, b) it’s easy to hire for, and c) we only want to use it for a couple of features, not the entire website.
It’s all depressingly familiar, but it’s very weird to come across this kind of outdated thinking in 2023.
My personal prediction is that, eventually, the company (and many other companies) will realize how bad React is for most things, and abandon it. I guess we’ll see.
There’s a cost to using dependencies. New versions are released, APIs change, and it takes time and effort to make sure your own code remains compatible with them. And the cost accumulates over time.
This post is about more than web components:
If we want our work to be accessible in five or ten or even 20 years, we need to use the web with no layers in between. For all its warts, the web has become the most resilient, portable, future-proof computing platform we’ve ever created — at least, if we build with that in mind.
A difference of opinion regarding what the core features of custom elements should be.
Here’s Clearleft’s approach to browser support. You can use it too (it’s CC-licensed).
Here’s how I interpret the top-level guidance in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
A performance boost in Chrome.
If a browser feature can be used as a progressive enhancement, you don’t have to wait for all browsers to support it.