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August 1, 2016

Filed under: tech»web

<slide-show>

On Thursday, I'll be giving a talk at CascadiaFest on using custom elements in production. It's kind of a sales pitch, to convince people that adopting web components is safe to do, despite the instability of the spec and the contentious politics between browsers. After all, we've been publishing with several components at the Times for almost two years now, with good results.

When I presented an early version of this at SeattleJS, I presented by scrolling through a single text file instead of slides, because I've always wanted to do that. But for Cascadia, I wanted to do something a little more special, so I built the presentation itself out of custom elements, with the goal that it would demonstrate how to write code that works with both versions of the spec. It's also meant to be a good example for someone who's just learning how web components function — I use pretty much every custom elements feature at one point or another in 300 lines of code. You can take a look at the source for it here.

There are several strategies that I ended up emphasizing while writing the <slide-show> elements, primarily the heavy use of events to tame asynchronicity. It turns out that between V0, V1, and the two major polyfills, elements and their attributes are resolved by the parser with entirely different timing. It's really important that child elements notify their parent when they upgrade, and parents shouldn't assume that children are ready at startup.

One way to deal with asynchronous upgrades is just to put all your functionality in the parent element (our <leaflet-map> does this), but I wanted to make these slides easier to extend with new types (such as text, code, or image slides). In this case, the slide show looks for a parsedContent property on the current slide, and it's the child's job to populate and update that value. An earlier version called a parseContents() method, but using properties as "duck-typing" makes it much easier to handle un-upgraded elements, and moving the responsibility to the child also greatly simplified the process of watching slide contents for changes.

A nice side effect of using live properties and events is that it "feels" a lot more like a built-in element. The modern DOM API is built on similar primitives, so writing the glue code for the UI ended up being very pleasant, and it's possible to interact using the dev tools in a natural way. I suspect that well-built component libraries in the future will be judged on how well they leverage a declarative interface to blend in with existing elements.

Ironically, between child elements and Shadow DOM, it's actually much harder to move between different polyfills than it is to write an element definition for both the new and old specifications. We've always written for Giammarchi's registerElement shim at the Times, and it was shocking for me to find out that Polymer's shim not only diverges from its counterpart, but also differs from Chrome's native implementation. Coding around these differences took a bit of effort, but it's probably work I should have done at the start, and the result is quite a bit nicer than some of the hacks I've done for the Times. I almost feel like I need to go back now and update them with what I've learned.

Writing this presentation was a good way to make sure I was current on the new spec, and I'm actually pretty happy with the way things have turned out. When WebKit started prototyping their own API, I started to get a bit nervous, but the resulting changes are relatively minor: some property names have changed, the lifecycle is ordered a bit differently, and upgrade code is called in the constructor (to encourage using the class syntax) instead of from a createdCallback() method. Most of these are positive alterations, and while there are some losses going from V0 to V1 (no is attribute to subclass arbitrary elements), they're not dealbreakers. Overall, I'm more optimistic about the future of web components than I have in quite a while, and I'm looking forward to telling people about it at Cascadia!

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