That HTML Blog #12: Invokers, Web Component Longevity, & WebDev Q&A
Friday, November 10, 2023
Based on everything I'm seeing, 2024 is shaping up to be an incredible year for fans of vanilla web development. 💥 Lots of features will be entering production-ready status based on browser stats, and I'm betting CSS Nesting will be one of those. We've already had nesting in evergreen browsers, and even now browsers are rolling out "relaxed" nesting which feels even more like the Sass syntax of old. Yet if you stick with the stricter nesting (aka needing to use & in a few more places), you may come to decide at some point next year you're willing to use it without any transpilation/build step in between. Couple that with the likelihood Firefox will finally ship Declarative Shadow DOM support, plus widespread adoption of Cascade Layers, and it's a bonanza for stylesheet wranglers looking to tame complexity across a myriad of projects and component libraries. 🎨
(If you'd like to get a jumpstart on some of those topics today, check out my CSS Nouveau course over at The Spicy Web. 🌶️)
Now without further ado, on with the links! 🔗 –J
The Invokers Are Coming ➦
The fine folks at Open UI have been working hard on a lot of exciting new proposals to make building web interfaces easier, and my absolute favorite so far has been Invokers.
I think it’s obvious that the invokers mechanism—should it eventually roll out to all browsers mostly along these lines—is an absolute game changer for how interactive UI on the web gets built…
The Longevity of Web Components Over Frameworks ➦
So much good stuff to unpack in Jake Lazaroff’s essay Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework. Even with the opening caveat that he believes “React is a good default option”, Jake starts to dive into why for his evergreen Markdown content, he decided web components were the right way to add embedded interactivity (over something like MDX or Astro components)…
Thoughts on Chris Coyier’s Answers to Questions About Web Design ➦
Chris Coyier, always the concise blogger, offered a list of “no-nuance” answers to common web design questions. In the spirit of no-nuance, I agree with his answers!
But if I didn’t and cared to quibble with a few, just for fun here are a few of my added comments.
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