Simon Willison’s Weblog

My approach to HTML web components. Some neat patterns here from Jeremy Keith, who is using Web Components extensively for progressive enhancement of existing markup.

The reactivity you get with full-on frameworks [like React and Vue] isn’t something that web components offer. But I do think web components can replace jQuery and other approaches to scripting the DOM.

Jeremy likes naming components with their element as a prefix (since all element names must contain at least one hyphen), and suggests building components under the single responsibility principle - so you can do things like <button-confirm><button-clipboard><button>....

He configures these buttons with data- attributes and has them communicate with each other using custom events.

Something I hadn't realized is that since the connectedCallback function on a custom element is fired any time that element is attached to a page you can fetch() and then insertHTML content that includes elements and know that they will initialize themselves without needing any extra logic - great for the kind of pattern encourages by systems such as HTMX.