htm VS webcomponents

The preact team also dislikes transpiling jsx so they've developed an alternative using tagged template literals: https://github.com/developit/htm

So getting this to work without bundler magic is very hard. It's not surprising why NextJS is investing in a bundler. Though one thing that really sticks out is how much complexity we add for just miniscule dev ergonomics. Not using JSX and using something like htm would make all this easier (removing the bundler entirely), it's a lot of overhead to avoid a couple of quotes. React should really have a tagged-template mode. Also all of this is indirection is actually bad for dev ergonomics too! One of the reasons I did this is because I'm absolutely sick of magic caches and sorting through code that's been crushed by a bundler into something I don't recognize and can't easily debug. While we can't get rid of this completely (ts/jsx) this preserves the module import graph completely on the client-side making it easy to find things as you are working and preserving line numbers. This obviously is not useful for a production build and there's a lot of work that would need to go in to support both modes over the same code, but it's depressing no tools really work like this for local development.

You can also do JSX and skip the build step with preact + htm : https://github.com/developit/htm#example

While I was able to achieve this fairly easily, the developer experience of manually stitching strings together wasnt great. Being myself a fan of buildless libraries, such as htm and lit-html, I figured I'd try to take a stab at implementing a DSL for component-like templating in Service Workers myself, called Service Worker Templating Language (SWTL), here's what it looks like:

I would however highly recommend https://github.com/developit/htm

I thought the same thing, but apparently "HTM" is a JSX like javascript string template representation of HTML, and it can be found here: https://github.com/developit/htm

If you're going to do a no-build approach, assume modern JS (so you don't have to transpile the JS syntax). Also, you can use https://github.com/developit/htm as a nearly-identical equivalent to JSX syntax, also without transpiling.

This seems like a case of caring way too much about something that's hardly very different. JSX versus tagged template strings can be incredibly similar to one another.

The examples in this article are using vanilla template strings to author raw html, but that only misses a couple of nicities JSX has. There are tagged template string libraries like htm[1] that do include some of the few nicities JSX has, but which are actually compatible with the official language.

[1] https://github.com/developit/htm

The first one exists in JavaScript and is called Tagged Template Literals. I agree with the author that its a nice feature. It's the perfect construct to use for prepared SQL statements, LINQ-style queries, or reimplementing a JSX-like syntax (see HTM https://github.com/developit/htm).

There is however a library that is closer to JSX (HTML-like feel) but yet does not require a build step. htm. HTM uses tagged templates to leverage template literal as native Javascript template strings. If you have not played with tagged templates, I encourage you to check this out, it's a quite powerful feature, that has recently become a part of Javascript.

It's not all that shiny. Web components have global names (you should pretty much apply a prefix/namespace if you want to work with others) and managing multiple version of the same component in the same page is an issue in any non trivial codebase (either use a different name per version or fix all breaking changes at once during the upgrade, unless the draft about scoping web elements became standard https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposal... )

I've recently just started playing with Web Components without a build environment. Meaning, no npm, no bun, no webpack, etc, and no dependencies; in typescript. Intellij can autocompile down to js and the browser view injects a small onchange handler for live updates when developing. So far no problems.

The only thing holding web components back seems to be HTML Modules; being able to link to a .html file instead of a .js file to import a web component. Because of this if you want to use templates or anything more complicated you need to do the ugly inject of .innerHtml = `...`, which I thought would be a problem but the IDE parses the template string very nicely. It would be great to make a component in HTML and any javascript you would put in a tag. It seems like there a lot of bureaucracy involved in getting HTML Modules out the door since its been eight years.<p><a href="https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposals/html-modules-explainer.md#high-level-summary">https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposal...</a>

We're trying to advocate for greater flexibility in cross-component styling. One proposal is "open styleable shadow-roots" which would be an opt-in to let styles from above a component to apply to it's shadow root. I think this would help migration in situations where app teams are currently using global stylesheets.

Feedback and support of the need for something like this would help a lot: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/909

))

Part 1.

> I honestly believe that 90% of the dislike for WC comes from the name "connectedCallback". If they'd named it "onCreate" or something, everyone would be using it

Of course not. None of the criticism towards Web Components ever mentions "connectedCallback", or how it should be named differently.

Do you know the actual reason so few are using them? Let's skip the atrocious not-really-high-level not-really-low-level imperative API that they offer.

How about:

- 13 years after introduction they still need 20 more specs to try and patch just some of the holes in their original design: https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html

- Shadow DOM is infecting every spec so that the actual useful specs like Scoped CSS have to be delayed almost indefinitely to try and figure out how to work with this abomination of a design

To quote the report linked above, "many of these pain points are directly related to Shadow DOM's encapsulation"

- The amount of specs that are required to make them work, barely, and be "good web citizens". And the amount of APIs.

Oh, you want your custom input to a) be able to send its data in a form, and b) be accessible to a label outside of your component? Well, there's a separate API for a) and there's some separate future API for b). And meanwhile your custom button won't be able to submit your form, sorry, it's a 4-year old issue with no solution: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/814

And all that despite the fact that there are already a dozen specs covering web components, and dozens more on their way.

- Web Components ar HTMLElement. It means you cannot use them inside SVGs.

This is impossible:

The lit-plugin in for VS Code offers syntax highlighting, jumpt-to-definition, etc: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=runem.li...

Prettier already supports HTML in html`` strings, likewise, CSS.

> Is there a way in Lit to write the templates in regular HTML rather than a string?

This would require a compiler. You would need to load the HTML into the JS module graph and JS can't do that yet, though there is a proposal for it: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposal...

Template in HTML also have the problem of the data not being in scope as it is in JS, and there not being an expression language. So you ned up having to re-implement a lot of JS embedded into the HTML syntax, which then preferences a compiler-based approach to make fast. It turns out to be a lot simpler to embed HTML in JS.

It's more than just sugar now. You can't even write web components functionally: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/587

gzip/brotli handles this very well, but it still is text to parse through.

Some form of declarative CSS module scripts would help a lot. A feature request for that here: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/939

In the past I've seen this one:

https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposal...

Perhaps there are more recent versions.

I liked the spirit of the proposal, but never studied it.