Awesome Standalone (Web Components)

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In his last An Event Apart talk, Dave made a point that it’s really only just about right now that Web Components are becoming a practical choice for production web development. For example, it has only been about a year since Edge went Chromium. Before that, Edge didn’t support any Web Component stuff. If you were shipping them long ago, you were doing so with fairly big polyfills, or in a progressive-enhancement style, where if they failed, they did so gracefully or in a controlled environment, say, an intranet where everyone has the same computer (or in something like Electron).

In my opinion, Web Components still have a ways to go to be compelling to most developers, but they are getting there. One thing that I think will push their adoption along is the incredibly easy DX of pre-built components thanks to, in part, ES Modules and how easy it is to import JavaScript.

I’ve mentioned this one before: look how silly-easy it is to use Nolan Lawson’s emoji picker:

That’s one line of JavaScript and one line of HTML to get it working, and another one line of JavaScript to wire it up and return a JSON response of a selection.

Compelling, indeed. DX, you might call it.

Web Components like that aren’t alone, hence the title of this post. Dave put together a list of Awesome Standalones. That is, Web Components that aren’t a part of some bigger more complex system¹, but are just little drop-in doodads that are useful on their own, just like the emoji picker. Dave’s repo lists about 20 of them.

Take this one from GitHub (the company), a copy-to-clipboard Web Component:

Pretty sweet for something that comes across the wire at ~3KB. The production story is whatever you want it to be. Use it off the CDN. Bundle it up with your stuff. Self-host it be leave it a one-off. Whatever. It’s darn easy to use. In the case of this standalone, there isn’t even any Shadow DOM to deal with.

No shade on Shadow DOM, that’s perhaps the most useful feature of Web Components (and cannot be replicated by a library since it’s a native browser feature), but the options for styling it aren’t my favorite. And if you used three different standalone components with three different opinions on how to style through the Shadow DOM, that’s going to get annoying.

What I picture is developers dipping their toes into stuff like this, seeing the benefits, and using more and more of them in what they are building, and even building their own. Building a design system from Web Components seems like a real sweet spot to me, like many big names² already do.

The dream is for people to actually consolidate common UI patterns. Like, even if we never get native HTML “tabs” it’s possible that a Web Component could provide them, get the UI, UX, and accessibility perfect, yet leave them style-able such that literally any website could use them. But first, that needs to exist.

1. That’s a cool way to use Web Components, too, but easy gets attention, and that matters. ⮑
2. People always mention Lightning Design System as a Web Components-based design system, but I’m not seeing it. For example, this accordion looks like semantic HTML with class names, not Web Components. What am I missing? ⮑

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