webcomponents VS shoelace-css

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.

HTMX gets all the hype right now, but there are other tools in the same vain, my favorite being Unpoly (https://unpoly.com). Together with Shoelace (https://shoelace.style) you get nice GUIs real fast, without the burden of complicated dependency management and build steps. Also, you don't have to write a lot of JS, just what is needed for small enhancements, as it was meant to be. Some might say the main drawback is the tight coupling to your backend. In my case, this is also the main benefit as it integrates perfectly with the backend framework (Django).

Hello HN,

I'm releasing Hyperdiv (https://hyperdiv.io), a framework for rapidly developing reactive browser UIs in Python, with immediate-mode syntax and using Shoelace (https://shoelace.style) as its built-in component system.

This short coding video will give you a good idea of what it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJKfxaqvGE

I wrote a brief article about the motivation and approach: https://hyperdiv.io/intro.html

Hyperdiv doesn't aim to compete with serious full-stack frameworks. The core aim was to make it easy and fast to prototype apps and build UI-based tools. I was originally motivated by internal tools at work -- feeling the need to quickly put together UI-based tools to share with both technical and non-technical coworkers, without having to stand up and maintain a full internal stack.

This is my first major open source release. I really appreciate your feedback and support. - Marius

For example, all the following design systems can be used without tooling (some of them provide ready-to-use bundles, others can be used through import maps): Google's Material Web, Microsoft's Fluent UI, IBM's Carbon, Adobe's Spectrum, Nordhealth's Nord, Shoelace, etc.

Here's what this looks like - note that I'm using Shoelace components for styling purposes.

There are lots of open-source design systems built with Lit. Shoelace is a popular component set that you might check out: https://github.com/shoelace-style/shoelace There are many others...

Would it help if we listed more open source projects on our site?

Because of our focus on components and the fact that you really can use just about any libraries and scaffolding for apps, we don't really have an app starter kit, but it's something we've talked about.

I'm really excited about all this, and it makes me have some faith in the web again. I think that Lit is a step in the right direction especially the ability to do SSR / SSG and hydrate a web page. Hopefully 🤞 Shoelace can get SSR running, which is currently one hurdle, but I think it is achievable.