webcomponents VS Alpine.js

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.

Alpine.js for reactive frontend

✨ In recent months, I have been developing web projects using GOTTHA stack: Go + Templ + Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js. As soon as I'm ready to talk about all the subtleties and pitfalls, I'll post it on my social networks.

> But honestly, torn towards htmx but undecided.

We are in the middle of migrating from our monster react application into server rendered pages (with jinja2). The velocity at which we are able to ship and the reduction of complexity has been great so far.

Managing client side state for simple things like (is the dropdown open/closed), listening to keyboard events and such can be done with something like alpine-js [1] without all the baggage that something like react brings.

It appears this is already the trend with JS frameworks too - with server side rendering being the new norm.

[1] https://alpinejs.dev/

Sure, you can use any number of JS-avoidance libraries. I'm a fan of Turbo, and there's also htmx, Unpoly, Alpine, hyperscript, swup, barba.js, and probably others.

Direct DOM, but with a library. Specifically AlpineJS since it follows Vue closely in design practices allowing me to scale into a full web application if necessary (basically swapping to Vue takes minimal work). The Morph plugin is specifically what I like using.

If you want more details on the initial setup I encourage you to take a look at the Part I that covers more of the initial implementation. For this portion, I added Prisma as an ORM, a frontend style library called Tachyons, and AlpineJS to handle any client-side interactions. I did this to avoid needing to add a client-side bundler to the build and instead just rely on plain old module imports to compose the frontend. This is now the default for Rails and it is quite nice to not need any additional build tools for the client.

- [swallow-pywebview](https://github.com/rangwea/swallow-pywebview)： Base on [pywebview](https://pywebview.flowrl.com/) using Python，the frontend base on [alpinejs](https://alpinejs.dev/) and [tailwindcss](https://tailwindcss.com/)。

If you’ve followed our other tutorials, you might be familiar with Alpine.js. It’s a lightweight JavaScript library that allows you to add interactivity to your site without writing a single line of JavaScript. It’s incredibly easy to use, and we’ll show you how to make the animation trigger when the user scrolls to it.

The approach is not new, essentially a variation of Knockout, Alpine, and similar "JS-in-HTML" approaches.