Web Components Are Not the Future
Oh boy. So this post actually started a firestorm on the internet between various groups of people. Framework authors, library makers, open source contributors, spectators, pretty much everyone in WebDev had something to say about this.
This post will give you the side of Ryan Carniato, the creator of Solid.js and who I like to think of as the one responsible for the resurgence of fine-grained reactivity in frameworks.
Web components are a great concept, in the utopia they offer us as developers to be free from the constraints of frameworks and to have completely portable components. However if you ask me (you didnât but I will pretend you did) I agree with Ryanâs take that there cannot be an abstraction we create that can be so encompassing and perfect that we codify it into the foundation of the web. The web is not like other platforms, there are no take-backs here.
https://dev.to/ryansolid/web-components-are-not-the-future-48bh
The Trials and Tribulations of the Title Attribute
I was watching a talk by the always-on-point Sarah Soueidan (go watch it) in which she talks about the title attribute and how it affects accessibility. I took a great interest in it obviously because Iâm a huge nerd but also because I have seen developers slather a title onto any element they want solely to get a pseudo-tooltip effect.
Scott OâHara (the legend) talks about how truly goofy the title attribute is and how readers and browsers interact with them. If youâre looking for a tl;dr hereâs a pretty succinct quote from the article
With that in mind, this wonât be an article aimed to promote the use of the attribute
But give it a read! The details in it will surprise you and itâs good to have in your back pocket for when you need to hammer another devâs PR or shoot down a product request.
https://www.24a11y.com/2017/the-trials-and-tribulations-of-the-title-attribute/
TypeScript and Compile Caching
Ok so this isnât so much an article as it is a rabbit hole for the curious developer. @joyeecheung has been doing great work with her contributions to the Node runtime, and one of her recent contributions was adding APIs for authors to enable their code to be cached in V8âs code cache. When the enableCompileCache() method is called, the compiled bytecode will be cached into a temp directory by default or whichever directory is provided by the user.
This is great for a lot of libraries, and I call out TypeScript here specifically because tsc and tsserver are one of those applications you find yourself running constantly. It runs in your editor and in your terminal to build and watch your app. Consult the PR available here to review the performance gains to to the larger Typescript entrypoints.
https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/pull/59720
Animate to Height Auto
No your eyes do not deceive you, its really happening gang. If youâve ever had to create a component on a web page like an accordion then youâve definitely dealt with this issue. The question always becomes, how do I use native CSS transitions to animate from a height of 0 to an indeterminate height?
The crushing disappointment of trying to use the transition property in CSS and finding that it wonât suffice is unfortunately some kind of initiation ritual in Web Dev. That will be set to change however with the interpolate-size keyword.
The article is full of more in depth examples and links which Iâd recommend perusing if youâre new to the problem space. Yes, you could have reached for library like motion in order to animate these (like I have over the years) but I for one appreciate having CSS be so powerful.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/animate-to-height-auto