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.
Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!
This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?
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.
Some neat CSS from Tess that’s a great example of progressive enhancement; these book covers look good in all browsers, but they look even better in some.
Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.
Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.
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.
There’s quite a crossover between resilience and longevity:
- Understand the requirements
- Keep scope small and fixed
- Reduce dependencies
- Produce static output
- Increase Quality Assurance
When I set about writing this article, I intended it to be a strong argument for progressive rendering. But after digging into it, my feelings are less certain.
Here’s a comprehensive round-up of new CSS that you can use right now—you can expect to see some of this in action at Web Day Out!
There’s really good browser support for display-mode media queries and this article does a really good job of running through some of the use cases for your progressive web app.
Put the kettle on. This is a long one!
Matt takes a trip down memory lane and looks at all the frontend tools, technologies, and techniques that have come and gone over the years.
But this isn’t about nostalgia (although it does make you appreciate how far we’ve come). He’s looking at whether anything from the past is worth keeping today.
Studying past best practices and legacy systems is crucial for understanding the evolution of technology and making informed decisions today.
There’s only one technique that makes the cut:
After discussing countless legacy approaches and techniques best left in the past, you’ve finally arrived at a truly timeless and Incredibly important methodology.
I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.
And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:
At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.
The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.
This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.
I should be using the lh and rlh units more enough—they’re supported across the board!
I’m obviously biased, but I like the sound of what Chris is doing to create a library of HTML web components.
This is clever: putting CSS inside a noscript element to hide anything that requires JavaScript.
- Basic functionality should work on any device that can access the web.
- Extras and flourishes are treated as progressive enhancements for modern devices.
- The UI can look different and even clunky on older devices and browsers, as long as it doesn’t break rule #1.