You can use Web Components without the shadow DOM
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
Link tags: progressive
513
JavaScript dos and donts @ Mu-An Chiou
Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.
Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement - Service Manual - GOV.UK
Oh, how I wish that every team building for the web would use this sensible approach!
Request for developer feedback: customizable select | Blog | Chrome for Developers
I’m very glad to see that work has moved away from a separate selectmenu element to instead enhancing the existing select element—I could never see an upgrade path for selectmenu, but now there are plenty of opportunities for progressive enhancement.
Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’ - The New Stack
Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.
Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape - Infrequently Noted
I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred “DX” puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.
Alex doesn’t pull his punches in this four-part truth-telling:
The React anti-pattern of hugely bloated single-page apps has to stop. And we can stop it.
Success or failure is in your hands, literally. Others in the equation may have authority, but you have power.
Begin to use that power to make noise. Refuse to go along with plans to build YAJSD (Yet Another JavaScript Disaster). Engineering leaders look to their senior engineers for trusted guidance about what technologies to adopt. When someone inevitably proposes the React rewrite, do not be silent. Do not let the bullshit arguments and nonsense justifications pass unchallenged. Make it clear to engineering leadership that this stuff is expensive and is absolutely not “standard”.
HTML Web Components Can Have a Little Shadow DOM, As A Treat | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer
This is an interesting thought from Scott: using Shadow DOM in HTML web components but only as a way of providing sort-of user-agent styles:
providing some default, low-specificity styles for our slotted light-dom HTML elements while allowing them to be easily overridden.
HTML Web Components Make Progressive Enhancement And CSS Encapsulation Easier! | CSS-Tricks
Three great examples of HTML web components:
What I hope is that you now have the same sort of epiphany that I had when reading Jeremy Keith’s post: HTML Web Components are an HTML-first feature.
It’s about time I tried to explain what progressive enhancement actually is - Piccalilli
Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.
The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.
MSEdgeExplainers/WebInstall/explainer_same_domain.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers
This proposal is exactly what I was asking for!
C’mon browsers, let’s make this happen!
Your site or app should work as much as possible without JavaScript | Go Make Things
Photoshop in the browser? That needs JS.
But the reality is, most of what we build is either static HTML or mostly just forms and page reloads. We can build the web that way by default, and progressively enhance a more Ajaxy experience on top of it.
The result is an app that’s faster to load, faster to run, and less prone to breaking… without much additional work for your developers.
Futuristic Progressive Enhancement - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
We’re all tired of: write some code, come back to it in six months, try to make it do more, and find the whole project is broken until you upgrade everything.
Progressive enhancement allows you to do the opposite: write some code, come back to it in six months, and it’s doing more than the day you wrote it!
But what about the shadow DOM? | Go Make Things
So many of the problems and challenges of working with Web Components just fall away when you ditch the shadow DOM and use them as a light wrapper for progressive enhancement.
Web Components from early 2024 · Chris Burnell
Some lovely HTML web components—perfect for progressive enhancement!
How would you build Wordle with just HTML and CSS? | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer
This is a great thought exercise in progressive enhancement …that Scott then turns into a real exercise!
PodRocket - A web development podcast from LogRocket: HTML web components with Chris Ferdinandi
I somehow missed this when it came out in January but Amber just pointed me to it—an interview with Chris about HTML web components, available for your huffduffing pleasure.
A microdata enhanced HTML Webcomponent for Leaflet | k-nut — Blog
Here’s a nice HTML web component that uses structured data in the markup to populate a Leaflet map.
Personally I’d probably use microformats rather than microdata, but the princple is the same: progressive enhancement from plain old HTML to an interactive map.
WebKit Features in Safari 17.4 | WebKit
It’s a shame that the newest Safari release is overshadowed by Apple’s shenanigans and subsequent U-turn because there’s some great stuff in there.
I really like what they’re doing with web apps added to the dock:
Safari adds support for the
shortcutsmanifest member on macOS Sonoma. This gives you a mechanism in the manifest file for defining custom menu commands that will appear in the File menu and the Dock context menu.
Apple backs off killing web apps, but the fight continues - Open Web Advocacy
Hallelujah! Apple have backed down on their petulant plan to sabatoge homescreen apps.
I’m very grateful to the Open Web Advocacy group for standing up to this bullying.
jgarber623/aria-collapsible: A dependency-free Web Component that generates progressively-enhanced collapsible regions using ARIA States and Properties.
This is a really lovely little HTML web component from Jason. It does just one thing—wires up a trigger button to toggle-able content, taking care of all the ARIA for you behind the scenes.