Welcome to another collection of links, and for today, a very "component" flavored set of links. I've been really interested in web components the past few months (you can peruse my articles on the topic) and lately there's been a lot of writing on the topic. That's been tied to chatter online as well, but one of the reasons I started this series of posts was to help people find things they may have missed on social media. Personally, I'm finding my own thoughts on the subject changing as well. I still like them, but I want to keep in mind the user experience on a site that uses them. As a web developer, I shouldn't sacrifice the end-user experience for my own developer experience. I think I'm most interested in cases where web components can progressively enhance functionality. Anyway, here's our links.
Shining Light on the Shadow DOM
Here's a great presentation by Cassondra Roberts from CSS Day. She digs incredibly deep into styling and components. You can watch the complete presentation below:
And the slide deck itself can be viewed here: https://allons-y.llc/presentation/cssday/#0
Why Not Web Components?
Next up is an article by Dave Rupert, "If Web Components are so great, why am I not using them?". This is a short article but does a great job of explaining why it's taken so long for web components to get any kind of traction. Speaking for myself, while I had been hearing about them for a very long time, I hadn't really felt comfortable spending time learning about them until recently. I pretty much agree with every point Dave makes here.
SEO and Web Components
Finally, a quick article by Burton Smith, "SEO and Web Components - 2023 Edition", where he shows how search engines, well Google and Bing alone, handle indexing sites with web components. To be honest, the results match up with what I'd expect (Google has done a good job with JavaScript-generated content for a long time), but it was nice to see that the reality matched the expectations. I would have liked to see another search engine covered, like DuckDuckGo perhaps, but traffic from there is probably near zero for most folks.
Ok, now I feel bad saying that. I just checked my stats and while it is small compared to Google (14,477 referrals), DuckDuckGo (498) brought in more traffic than Bing (373).
And finally...
Thanks to the JavaScript Weekly newsletter for sharing this gem - Chip Player JS. This site servers over twenty thousand different midi tunes, all playable via the site itself. It also has a badass visualizer.
And yes, you can find Axel F on there.