That HTML Blog Weekly Digest #3: Jamstack, Lit, & More
Friday, August 4, 2023
Hey folks, it's another Friday! How about that. 😅
The big news of the week I suppose was that I published an article over at The Spicy Web called My Journey Away from the JAMstack regarding my first experiences building static sites with Jekyll, why Netlify was ahead of its time when I first switched to it, and where everything went wrong from there.
A lively conversation then ensued on Hacker News with even the CEO of Netlify weighing in on the matter. I must admit, that was quite the surprise! But at the end of the day, I'm just thankful there are other web hosting companies to choose from more aligned with a vision of the web I’m comfortable with.
This Podcast is Lit AF! 🔥 ➦
Justin Fagnani made a memorable appearance on the JS Party podcast to talk all about the world’s favorite (I would venture to say) web component base class: Lit.
It’s a great episode to listen to regardless of if you’re new to Lit or you’ve already been using it for a while. It’s also an impressive achievement that, in terms of NPM downloads, the library is now nipping at the heels of some of the biggest frontend packages in web development such as Preact and Angular and is ahead of Svelte.
Node Applications and Server-Rendered Web Components ➦
A key aspect of the web components ecosystem I believe will need to be thoroughly solved and proven in real production applications before WCs can be adopted in larger numbers is server rendering for “fullstack” development in popular environments such as Node.
Imagine a world where HTML pages and templates can easily be written using familiar web components concepts and then statically and/or dynamically rendered and sent to the browser. From there, you can once again target certain tag names for progressive enhancement as client-side web components. Call that hydration or islands or whatever you like.
Some libraries I’m aware of which allow for this:
- Lit SSR
- FAST SSR
- Enhance SSR
- WebC
In all cases, available documentation and real-world examples is scarce. This is by no means an indictment of these projects—I’m merely saying we have a long way yet to go.
I’d love to tinker with a sample starter project and compare using these and other similar WC SSR libraries. Got any recommendations?
There's plenty of material to share which didn't make it into this week's digest, so keep an eye on the blog next week! Until then, I hope you all have a great weekend! -Jared