That HTML Blog #18: Interop 2023/2024, Declarative Custom Elements, MutationObserver
Friday, March 29, 2024 Hello Web friends! I've been a busy beaver this month. We kicked off the version 2 development cycle of Bridgetown, a site generator & fullstack framework I help maintain, and I've been deep in the throes of that effort. In addition, I launched (rebooted in a way) a new general fediverse-friendly tech blog called The Internet Review. It draws from various archives I have stretching all the way back to 1996! (gawd I feel old now. 😋) But you're here to talk #WebDev, so let's shift gears. Got a couple links for you today…but before all that, I've been participating more regularly in the Web Components Community Group (WCCG), an organization very loosely affiliated with the W3C. There's been lots of chatter around the idea of Declarative Custom Elements (DCEs) as a way to make approaching development of web components easier as well as more performant and server rendering/HTML-friendly. Part of a series of proposals is the concept of HTML Modules, an idea whose time has most definitely come! I've been enjoying the conversation as well as contributing my thoughts and code samples. Hopefully a lot more will be ready to announce from this effort in the coming months. In somewhat related news, I have it on good authority that a platform-native implementation of Signals is about to be proposed with a detailed specification along with a "polyfill" of the spec. The best-care scenario here is that in the future we wouldn't need to pull in an implementation like Preact's Signals (a very good library though) but could rather use browser APIs directly for signals and effects. Definitely keeping on eye on this space! That's it for me today. Catch you on the next one! ✌️ P. S. If you've found That HTML Blog helpful, can you please pass this along and encourage your friends and colleges to subscribe? mkthanksbye! ☺️ MDN’s Recap of Interop 2023 from the Documentation Angle ➦It goes without saying that Interop is one of the best things to have happened to the implementation process of new web standards. Browser vendors and spec authors are working together more closely than ever—not simply to check a box eventually, but to ensure that the implementations are trustworthy, perform as expected across platforms—and perhaps most importantly, documented correctly. Brian Smith, Staff Technical Writer on the MDN Web Docs team, has provided a recap of the technical documentation process for Interop 2023 and what we can look forward to in 2024. More Fun with Web Components and MutationObserver ➦Sometimes components need to know what’s happening inside of them. Whether you’re working with the concept of “slots” or just plain ol’ HTML, you may need to react to changes imposed from without. Custom elements can of course monitor attribute changes via the Thankfully, the native platform provides a solution in the form of That HTML Blog See also our sibling publication The Spicy Web + Discord |