Journal

Here’s a new development in the Web Components story, and one that may have positive implications for resilience, performance and progressive enhancement.

Declarative Shadow DOM is a new way to implement and use Shadow DOM directly in HTML rather than by constructing a shadow root in JavaScript.

But some people including Chris Coyier and Brad Frost) reckon that writing that looks horrible. Brad said:

Declarative Shadow DOM always looked gross to me and I felt it almost defeats the purpose of web components.

And Chris added:

the server-side rendering story for Web Components, Declarative Shadow DOM, doesn’t feel very nice to me if you have to do it manually.

However Lit, a library which makes working with Web Components easier, are now providing ways to make this easier when Lit is used with Eleventy.

Brad likes this:

With tools like this (especially this @lit-labs/ssr project), we can have our cake and eat it too: use web components in a dev-friendly way, and then have the machines do the heavy lifting to convert that into a grosser-yet-progressive-enhancement-enabled syntax that ships to the user.

As does Chris:

using JavaScript frameworks in an entirely-client-side rendered way isn’t nearly as good for anything (users, SEO, performance, accessibility, etc) as server-side rendering (the effects of hydration are still debatable, but I view as largely worth it) … [but] the server-side rendering story for Web Components, Declarative Shadow DOM, doesn’t feel very nice to me if you have to do it manually. So… don’t do it manually! Let Eleventy do it!

As an additional footnote, perhaps we can make frameworks other than Eleventy (such as Rails) create server-rendered custom elements with Declarative Shadow DOM in a similar way. One to explore.

Had a lot fun playing records live from the window of my local radio station.

This selection kicked off with some deep jazz and boogie, worked through the gears with brazilian sounds and electro, then finished with some heads-down house, techno… and Rick James, mofo!

Listen to the show on Soundcloud.

Here’s the tracklist:

1. Lonnie Liston Smith - Saiz
2. Charles Stepney - On your face
3. Metropolis – Every time I see him
4. Kaidi Tatham – Don't Rush The Process
5. Admin – Step into light
6. Charles Stepney – Denim Groove
7. Thundercat – Thousand Knives (tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto)
8. Eraan – Enough
9. Fudge Fingas vs. Vin Landers – Sum Background
10. Marcos Valle – Estrelar
11. Nahash – Terry
12. Gary Gritness – Lithium Polymer
13. Pépé Bradock – El Pescador
14. Mafikizolo – Loot
15. Rick James – Dance wit’ me

Thanks to Speedy, Susan and the RBV team for having me.

Zach tweeted last year to share a codepen which illustrates the very simple boilerplate needed for a minimum viable web component. Note: his example is so simple that in this case the JavaScript isn’t actually needed for the custom element to work, however the provided JS is a starting point for when you do actually intend to add JS-driven features.

The HTML:

<foo-component>Hello, world</foo-component>

foo-component {
  font-size: 4em;
}

customElements.define("foo-component", class extends HTMLElement {
  constructor() {
    super();
    // Add your custom functionality.
  }
});

When Mastermind comes on TV, Clair and I always enjoy competing against each other to see who’s most intelligent / least stupid and always jokingly say we’d fancy our chances in real life (although we really wouldn’t). So I enjoyed Sirin Kale’s amusing memoir on what it’s really like to get in the famous black chair!

It is spotlit, well worn, imposing. Its leather has been burnished by the arses of minds far greater than mine, minds capable of retaining all manner of trivia while staying cool under pressure and not panic-sweating profusely via their bum cheeks on to the seat; cellulite-free grey matter, crammed full of general knowledge like a suitcase you have to sit on to close. My mind, by comparison, is a duffel bag containing a single pair of socks.

Thanks once again to Matt Hobbs and GOV.UK for sharing their website visitor stats publicly so that we can learn from them. As ever, lots of juicy detail in Matt’s thread.

GOV.UK stats for January (1-31):

- Chrome - 45.08%

- Safari - 36.82%

- Edge - 7.38%

- Samsung Internet - 7.08%

- Firefox - 1.35%

- Android Webview - 0.72%

- Safari (in-app) - 0.61%

- Internet Explorer - 0.5%

100% = 187,969,863

#browserstats

—Matt Hobbs, @TheRealNooshu

In particular, their “usage by device type” stats see mobile at ~67%, Desktop at ~30.5%, Tablet at ~2.5%.

In terms of comparative traffic, according to Simliar Web’s Top 10 most visited UK websites list they’re hovering around #10.

Here’s a lovely, short (13 min) interview from an accessibility expert with a really positive outlook—highly recommended.

Q: What’s just one thing that every single person can do in the progression toward an accessible internet?

A: When you’re talking to colleagues, peers… promote the notion that accessibility is just part of what we do because we’re good at our job. It’s not extraordinary, it’s not unusual, it’s not something you can drop because you’re pushing for launch.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been watching an interview with Brad Frost on Storybook’s channel. I’m still only halfway through but it’s great so far.

One part I’m loving is, from about 25 mins in, when Brad talks abut how Atomic Design crucially includes the notion of not only “breaking interfaces down” (like every DS does) but also “building them back up”. It’s not just the atoms and molecules that are important, but also combining them into (in Atomic Design parlance) organisms and templates, too. For example when using Storybook as an internal workshop (in my team our equivalent is LookBook), he makes a point of it not just including components but also templates, so that:

we can internally test with a high degree of confidence before handing over to our user-consumers that when our components are assembled together, they work”.

I like the idea of our workshop containing not just components but also multicomponent arrangements, or even full page templates. It’d mean less need to go arrange this stuff in the consuming application all the time. Brad’s chat also chimes with some recent thoughts I’ve been having about Patterns and also a tweet from Heydon Pickering regarding a catalogue vs a system.

Essentially, I think that in component libraries, notions of hierarchy and composition are really important. Simply having “a catalogue of components” (including lots that are common to all Design Systems) might not hugely separate your library from Bootstrap or Material. However it’s our ability to combine our custom legos into specific higher order arrangements, and our care for making sure they combine together harmoniously that creates our own special sauce.

I recorded a talk on “Hiding elements on the web” for @freeagent’s tech blog. It’s a tricky #FrontEnd & #a11y topic so I try to cover some good practices and responsible choices. Hope it helps someone. (Also it’s my first video. Lots of room to improve!)

Alex Page, a Design System engineer at Spotify, has just asked:

What open-source design systems are built with web components? Anyone exploring this space? Curious to learn what is working and what is challenging. #designsystems #webcomponents

And there are lots of interesting examples in the replies.

I plan to read up on some of the stories behind these systems.

I really like Web Components but given that I don’t take a “JavaScript all the things” approach to development and design system components, I’ve been reluctant to consider that web components should be used for every component in a system. They would certainly offer a lovely, HTML-based interface for component consumers and offer interoperability benefits such as Figma integration. But if we shift all the business logic that we currently manage on the server to client-side JavaScript then:

• the user pays the price of downloading that additional code;
• you’re writing client-side JavaScript even for those of your components that aren’t interactive; and
• you’re making everything a custom element (which as Jim Neilsen has previously written brings HTML semantics and accessibility challenges).

However maybe we can keep the JavaScript for our Web Component-based components really lightweight? I don’t know. For now I’m interested to just watch and learn.

After a couple of years of reading about web components (and a lot of head-scratching), I’ve finally got around to properly creating one… or at least a rough first draft!

Check out disclosure-widget on codepen.

See also my pen which imports and consumes the component.

Caveats and to-dos:

• I haven’t yet tried writing tests for a web component
• I should find out how to refer to the custom element name in JavaScript without repeating it
• I should look into whether observedAttributes and attributeChangedCallback are more appropriate than the more typical event listeners I used

References

I found Eric Bidelman’s article Custom Elements v1: Reusable Web Components pretty handy. In particular it taught me how to create a <template> including a <slot> to automatically ringfence the Light DOM content, and then to attach that template to the Shadow DOM to achieve my enhanced component.