The Power of Web Components
Background Ever since the first animated DHTML cursor trails and “Site of the Week” badges graced the web, re-usable code has been a temptation for web developers. And ever since those heady days, integrating third-party UI into your site has been, well, a semi-brittle headache. Using other people’s clever code has required buckets of boilerplate JavaScript or CSS conflicts involving the dreaded !important. Things are a bit better in the world of React and other modern frameworks, but it’s a bit of a tall order to require the overhead of a full framework just to re-use a widget. HTML5 introduced a few new elements like <video> and <input type="date">, which added some much-needed common UI widgets to the web platform. But adding new standard elements for every sufficiently common web…