Introduction to HTML Components
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Introduction to HTML Components
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Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#2I'm slightly confused by the combination of "introduced in Internet Explorer 5.5" and "offers a powerful new way" being written in an article posted on August 28, 2017
Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#3I'm slightly confused by the combination of "introduced in Internet Explorer 5.5" and "offers a powerful new way" being written in an article posted on August 28, 2017
FTA: cough OK, obviously it’s 2017 and Internet Explorer 5.5 isn’t relevant anymore. But if you’re a Web developer, this should have given you some pause for thought. The modern Web Components pillars: Templates, Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, and Imports, were all features originally in IE5, released in 1999.
Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#4I'm slightly confused by the combination of "introduced in Internet Explorer 5.5" and "offers a powerful new way" being written in an article posted on August 28, 2017
Did you even read the article ?
Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#5I'm slightly confused by the combination of "introduced in Internet Explorer 5.5" and "offers a powerful new way" being written in an article posted on August 28, 2017
FTA: cough OK, obviously it’s 2017 and Internet Explorer 5.5 isn’t relevant anymore. But if you’re a Web developer, this should have given you some pause for thought. The modern Web Components pillars: Templates, Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, and Imports, were all features originally in IE5, released in 1999.
It was a truly great release.
Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#6I used HTC a lot and waited for the other browsers to implement it. XBL came around but waited many years until it became web components. Great post!
Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#7Personally, I think there's an important lesson here, and its the same lesson that polymer is learning as it stumbles around trying to convince people to use it.
Most people don't actually derive much benefit from writing custom UI widget primitives.
Certainly, that's a useful thing for a UI toolkit builder to be able to do, but tangibly, for most people, it's not actually useful.
I don't have time to invest hours implementing `ImageDropDownSpinner` as a custom element. is good enough for me, and heck, maybe I'll use some 3rd party widget if I need something special.
That's not why react, vue, angular, etc. are winning the mind share of 'how to build web apps'; building UI widget is far less interesting than the ability to decompose your UI into a custom hierarchy of re-usable self contained units of functionality, that only at the lowest level actually involve UI components, is extremely powerful.
They might look like custom widgets, but isn't a UI widget, it's your entire application; that's the difference.
It's easy to say this was a revolutionary idea, before its time, and it would have flown today instead of vanished into obscurity... but I think it missed the mark; it didn't solve problems people were actually having.
...but to be fair, it's easy to look at 'Web Component' efforts (like Polymer...) and go... yeah, this seems very familiar...
Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#8[deleted]
Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#9I am not sure it is not a coincidence that the same idea keeps resurfacing. I remember reading pretty early on that HTML/XML/XHTML would eventually lead to a world where "chemists would have their own tags to represent chemical formulas" and similarly each discipline would develop their own tag language. Browsers would just know how to render them!
People have tried to materialize this idea in multiple ways over time - HTC, microformats, web components etc. It should not be surprising that the solutions are similar. This isn't to say the first implementation was the best, and the others have just forgotten history. I am sure there are some pretty senior web developers around who remember their history, and were even part of it. If anything we should be optimistic that the new implementations have learned from the mistakes of the past.
Re: Introduction to HTML Components
#10Personally, I think there's an important lesson here, and its the same lesson that polymer is learning as it stumbles around trying to convince people to use it. Most people don't actually derive much benefit from writing custom UI widget primitives. Certainly, that's a useful thing for a UI toolkit builder to be able to do, but tangibly, for most people, it's not actually useful. I don't have time to invest hours im…
I really tried with Polymer (for the last few months) but it was particularly verbose.
I remember implementing an "" tag, and thinking that this is so wild and "Out There" that I may simply never understand.
Annoyingly, there is a whole "Hybrid" mode as well. So there is no distinction between V1 and V2. If you are confused,you go to the docs, they aren't giving you what you need, so you go to one of the sample elements, and it is written in V1. So you have to read the migration guide to translate what is actually happening....
Then Polymer Summit happens, and now it is all JS based which, is far better for me but now it seems pointless to stay on Polymer 2.0, and Polymer 3 is a preview with no docs...
So I aborted this path, went to Angular and to be honest, it is beautiful. It is almost trivial compared to the bag of questions and confusion I had going on with Polymer.
I do look forward to going back there though when 3.0 is available.