1. Specificity - swim-line.buttons vs .swin-lines.buttons vs .buttons.swim-lanes. 2. Future pathing - Maybe you don't need a Web Component today, but you might need one tomorrow. 3. Cleaner - <swim-lane /> is just better than <div class="swim-lane" />
And since that would drive us to <div>, I don't see any value in <div class="swim-lanes"> over <swim-lanes>.
The word "component" has to mean something ultimately, and to me the defining feature of a web component is that it's self-contained: it brings along its own dependencies, whether that's JavaScript, templates, CSS, etc. Web components shouldn't require an external framework or external CSS (except for customization by the user) - those things should be implementation details depended on directly by the component.
This here is just CSS using tag names for selectors. The element is doing nothing on its own.
Which is fine! It's just not web components.
edit: Also, don't do this:
<link-button>
<a href="">Learn more</a>
</link-button>
Use classes:
<a class="button" href="">Learn more</a>
You can read the entirety of War and Peace in a single HTML file: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leo-tolstoy/war-and-peace/...
A marketing page, SaaS app landing, etc., will not even begin to approach that size, whether or not you add an extra wrapper around your <a>s.
> it's self-contained: it brings along its own dependencies, whether that's JavaScript, templates, CSS
> Also, don't do this [...] That just adds HTML bloat to the page, something people with a singular focus on eliminating JavaScript often forget to worry about. To many HTML elements can slow the page to a crawl.
A static JS-less page can handle a lot of HTML elements - "HTML bloat" isn't really a thing unless those HTML elements come with performance-impacting behaviour. Which "self-contained" web-components "bringing along their own dependencies" absolutely will.
> shouldn't require an external framework
If you're "bringing along your own dependencies" & you don't have any external framework to manage those dependencies, you're effectively loading each component instance as a kind of "statically linked" entity, whereby those links are in-memory. That's going to bloat your page enormously in all but the simplest of applications.
You can try to get by with auto-generated selectors for every possible value today, ([background="#FFFFFF"]{background: #FFFFFF}[background="#FFFFFE"]{background: #FFFFFE}...) but just mapping attributes to styles 1:1 does begin to feel like a very lightweight component.
(Note... I'm not convinced this is a great idea... but it could be interesting to mess around with.)
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
<div> and <span> are semantically neutral, so I'm not sure what SEO and accessibility challenges custom elements would introduce?
What woud have been a soup of `div` elements with various class names are now more meaningfully named elements like `<top-bar>`, `<chat-container>`, etc. that were mixed and remixed to create all the graphics.
Also no issues regarding performance that we've seen up to this point, which makes sense; browsers are very good and fast at rendering HTML elements (native or custom).
However, it's basically describing the "modifiers" part of BEM, which is a pattern that emerged from structuring CSS. Neither custom element or attributes are needed, even though they might feel different.
If you like that kind of pattern to structure CSS, then combining it with custom CSS properties (often called "variables", example: --block-spacing: 2rem) makes it even more modular. These properties follow the cascade rule.
hyperhello•1h ago