Simon Willison’s Weblog

Shoelace (via) Saw this for the first time today: it’s a relatively new library of framework-agnostic Web Components, built on lit-html and covering a huge array of common functionality: buttons and sliders and dialogs and drawer interfaces and dropdown menus and so on. The design is very clean, the documentation is superb—and it looks like you can cherry pick just the components you are using for a pretty lean addition to your page weight. So refreshing to see libraries like this that really take advantage of modern web standards. # 20th August 2022, 8:57 pm

PyScript demos (via) PyScript was announced at PyCon this morning. It’s a new open source project that provides Web Components built on top of Pyodide, allowing you to use Python directly within your HTML pages in a way that is executed using a WebAssembly copy of Python running in your browser. These demos really help illustrate what it can do—it’s a fascinating new piece of the Python web ecosystem. # 30th April 2022, 9:50 pm

Web Components as Progressive Enhancement (via) I think this is a key aspect of Web Components I had been missing: since they default to rendering their contents, you can use them as a wrapper around regular HTML elements that can then be progressively enhanced once the JavaScript has loaded. # 21st April 2022, 9:33 pm

lite-youtube-embed (via) Handy Web Component wrapper around the standard YouTube iframe embed which knocks over 500KB of JavaScript off the initial page load—I just added this to the datasette.io homepage and increased the Lighthouse performance score from 51 to 93! # 8th March 2022, 9:13 pm

SQLime: SQLite Playground (via) Anton Zhiyanov built this useful mobile-friendly online playground for trying things out it SQLite. It uses the sql.js library which compiles SQLite to WebAssembly, so it runs everything in the browser—but it also supports saving your work to Gists via the GitHub API. The JavaScript source code is fun to read: the site doesn’t use npm or Webpack or similar, opting instead to implement everything library-free using modern JavaScript modules and Web Components. # 17th January 2022, 7:08 pm

Tonic (via) Really interesting library for building Web Components: it’s tiny (just 350 lines of code), works directly in browsers without any compile or build step and makes very creative use of modern JavaScript features such as async generators. # 23rd October 2021, 5:21 am

matthewp/haunted: React’s Hooks API implemented for web components (via) It’s been fascinating over the past few days watching various frontend web stacks start playing with the new ideas introduced by the proposed React hooks API. lit-html is one of my favourite React alternatives—it’s built on web components and makes really clever use of ES6 template literals (in place of React’s JSX, which requires an additional compilation step). With Haunted Matthew Phillips explores the combination of lit-html, web components and hooks-style state management. # 31st October 2018, 1:04 am