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.
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.
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.
This is a good description of the appeal of HTML web components:
WC lifecycles are crazy simple: you register the component with
customElements.defineand it’s off to the races. Just write a class and the browser will take care of elements appearing and disappearing for you, regardless of whether they came from a full reload, a fetch request, or—god forbid—adocument.write. The syntax looks great in markup, too: no more having to decorate withjs-somethingclasses or data attributes, you just wrap your shit in a custom element calledsomething-controllerand everyone can see what you’re up to. Since I’m firmly in camp “progressively enhance or go home” this fits me like a glove, and I also have great hopes for Web Components improving the poor state of pulling in epic dependencies like date pickers or text editors.
The power of interoperability:
Web components won’t take web development by storm, or show us the One True Way to build websites. They don’t need to dethrone JavaScript frameworks. We probably won’t even all learn how to write them!
What web components will do — at least, I hope — is let us collectively build a rich ecosystem of dynamic components that work with any web stack. No more silos. That’s the web component success story.
A great talk from Dave on web components:
I think if you were using Web Components before 2020 you were an early adopter and you probably have some scars to show for it. But in 2021, now that all modern browsers support Web Components, I think they’re worth investigating. They have one superpower that no other JavaScript framework offers called the Shadow DOM which is both powerful but frustrating. But another superpower — the power I’m most excited about — is that you can use them standalone without any frameworks, build tools, or package managers.
The talk makes a callback to my talk Building from a few years back. I like that. It feels like a long thoughtful converstation.
A difference of opinion regarding what the core features of custom elements should be.
Try writing your HTML in HTML, your CSS in CSS, and your JavaScript in JavaScript.
An alternate route to a declarative version of the Web Share API.
A lazy option for responsive images is at hand.
The joy of getting hands-on with HTML and CSS.