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.
Here’s another nice progressive web component for your forms, this time for showing error messages.
Here’s an excellent progressive web component from Aaron—wrap a custom element around your exising form and your good to go:
At its core,
form-saveris a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values inlocalStorage, and restores them when the page loads again. Better yet, it clears out saved data after a successful submission so you’re not accidentally resurrecting stale information the next time someone stops by.
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.
Well, this is horrifying.
Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.
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.
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.
A UI library for people who love HTML, powered by modern CSS and Web Components.
I’m obviously biased, but I like the sound of what Chris is doing to create a library of HTML web components.
dialog, details, datalist, progress, optgroup, and more:
If this article helps just a single developer avoid an unnecessary Javascript dependency, I’ll be happy. Native HTML can handle plenty of features that people typically jump straight to JS for (or otherwise over-complicate).
This is very nice HTML web component by Miriam, progressively enhancing an ordered list of audio elements.
Every UI control you roll yourself is a liability. You have to design it, test it, ship it, document it, debug it, maintain it — the list goes on.
It makes you wonder why we insist on rolling (or styling) our own common UI controls so often. Perhaps we’d be better off asking: What are the fewest amount of components we have to build to deliver value to our users?
It’s great to see the evolution of HTML happening in response to real use-cases—the turbo-charging of the select element just gets better and better!
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.
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
Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.
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.
“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.”
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.