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It's been awhile since I wrote about FOUCE and I've since come up with an improved solution that I think is worth a post. This approach is similar to hiding the page content and then fading it in, but I've noticed it's far less distracting without the fade. It also adds a two second timeout to prevent network issues or latency from rendering an "empty" page. First, we'll add a class called reduce-fouce to the <html> element. <html class="reduce-fouce"> ... </html> Then we'll add this rule to the CSS. <style> html.reduce-fouce { opacity: 0; } </style> Finally, we'll wait until all the custom elements have loaded or two seconds have elapsed, whichever comes first, and we'll remove the class causing the content to show immediately. <script type="module"> await Promise.race([ // Load all custom elements Promise.allSettled([ customElements.whenDefined('my-button'), customElements.whenDefined('my-card'), customElements.whenDefined('my-rating') // ... ]), // Resolve after two seconds new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 2000)) ]); // Remove the class, showing the page content document.documentElement.classList.remove('reduce-fouce'); </script> This approach seems to work especially well and won't end up "stranding" the user if network issues occur.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, "'Tis a design system," I muttered, "bringing order to the core— Ah, distinctly I remember, every button, every splendor, Each component, standardized, like a raven's watchful eyes, Unified in system's might, like patterns we restore— And each separate style injection, linked with careful introspection, 'Tis a design system, nothing more.
It’s disappointing that some of the most outspoken individuals against Web Components are framework maintainers. These individuals are, after all, in some of the best positions to provide valuable feedback. They have a lot of great ideas! Alas, there’s little incentive for them because standards evolve independently and don’t necessarily align with framework opinions. How could they? Opinions are one of the things that make frameworks unique. And therein lies the problem. If you’re convinced that your way is the best and only way, it’s natural to feel disenchanted when a decision is made that you don’t fully agree with. This is my open response to Ryan Carniato’s post from yesterday called “Web Components Are Not the Future.” WTF is a component anyway? # The word component is a loaded term, but I like to think of it in relation to interoperability. If I write a component in Framework A, I would like to be able to use it in Framework B, C, and D without having to rewrite it or include its entire framework. I don’t think many will disagree with that objective. We’re not there yet, but the road has been paved and instead of learning to drive on it, frameworks are building…different roads. Ryan states: If the sheer number of JavaScript frameworks is any indicator we are nowhere near reaching a consensus on how one should author components on the web. And even if we were a bit closer today we were nowhere near there a decade ago. The thing is, we don’t need to agree on how to write components, we just need to agree on the underlying implementation, then you can use classes, hooks, or whatever flavor you want to create them. Turns out, we have a very well-known, ubiquitous technology that we’ve chosen to do this with: HTML. But it also can have a negative effect. If too many assumptions are made it becomes harder to explore alternative space because everything gravitates around the establishment. What is more established than a web standard that can never change? If the concern is premature standardization, well, it’s a bit late for that. So let’s figure out how to get from where we are now to where we want to be. The solution isn’t to start over at the specification level, it’s to rethink how front end frameworks engage with current and emerging standards and work to improve them. Respectfully, it’s time to stop complaining, move on, and fix the things folks perceive as suboptimal. The definition of component # That said, we also need to realize that Web Components aren’t a 1:1 replacement for framework components. They’re tangentially related things, and I think a lot of confusion stems from this. We should really fix the definition of component. So the fundamental problem with Web Components is that they are built on Custom Elements. Elements !== Components. More specifically, Elements are a subset of Components. One could argue that every Element could be a Component but not all Components are Elements. To be fair, I’ve never really liked the term “Web Components” because it competes with the concept of framework components, but that’s what caught on and that's what most people are familiar with these days. Alas, there is a very important distinction here. Sure, a button and a text field can be components, but there are other types. For example, many frameworks support a concept of renderless components that exist in your code, but not in the final HTML. You can’t do that with Web Components, because every custom element results in an actual DOM element. (FWIW I don’t think this is a bad thing — but I digress…) As to why Web components don’t do all the things framework components do, that’s because they’re a lower level implementation of an interoperable element. They’re not trying to do everything framework components do. That’s what frameworks are for. It’s ok to be shiny # In fact, this is where frameworks excel. They let you go above and beyond what the platform can do on its own. I fully support this trial-and-error way of doing things. After all, it’s fun to explore new ideas and live on the bleeding edge. We got a lot of cool stuff from doing that. We got document.querySelector() from jQuery. CSS Custom Properties were inspired by Sass. Tagged template literals were inspired by JSX. Soon we’re getting signals from Preact. And from all the component-based frameworks that came before them, we got Web Components: custom HTML elements that can be authored in many different ways (because we know people like choices) and are fully interoperable (if frameworks and metaframeworks would continue to move towards the standard instead of protecting their own). Frameworks are a testbed for new ideas that may or may not work out. We all need to be OK with that. Even framework authors. Especially framework authors. More importantly, we all need to stop being salty when our way isn’t what makes it into the browser. There will always be a better way to do something, but none of us have the foresight to know what a perfect solution looks like right now. Hindsight is 20/20. As humans, we’re constantly striving to make things better. We’re really good at it, by the way. But we must have the discipline to reach various checkpoints to pause, reflect, and gather feedback before continuing. Even the cheapest cars on the road today will outperform the Model T in every way. I’m sure Ford could have made the original Model T way better if they had spent another decade working on it, but do you know made the next version even better than 10 more years? The feedback they got from actual users who bought them, sat in them, and drove them around on actual roads. Web Standards offer a promise of stability and we need to move forward to improve them together. Using one’s influence to rally users against the very platform you’ve built your success on is damaging to both the platform and the community. We need these incredible minds to be less divisive and more collaborative. The right direction # Imagine if we applied the same arguments against HTML early on. What if we never standardized it at all? Would the Web be a better place if every site required a specific browser? (Narrator: it wasn't.) Would it be better if every site was Flash or a Java applet? (Remember Silverlight? lol) Sure, there are often better alternatives for every use case, but we have to pick something that works for the majority, then we can iterate on it. Web Components are a huge step in the direction of standardization and we should all be excited about that. But the Web Component implementation isn’t compatible with existing frameworks, and therein lies an existential problem. Web Components are a threat to the peaceful, proprietary way of life for frameworks that have amassed millions of users — the majority of web developers. Because opinions vary so wildly, when a new standard emerges frameworks can’t often adapt to them without breaking changes. And breaking changes can be detrimental to a user base. Have you spotted the issue? You can’t possibly champion Web Standards when you’ve built a non-standard thing that will break if you align with the emerging standard. It’s easier to oppose the threat than to adapt to it. And of course Web Components don’t do everything a framework does. How can the platform possibly add all the features every framework added last week? That would be absolutely reckless. And no, the platform doesn’t move as fast as your framework and that’s sometimes painful. But it’s by design. This process is what gives us APIs that continue to work for decades. As users, we need to get over this hurdle and start thinking about how frameworks can adapt to current standards and how to evolve them as new ones emerge. Let’s identify shortcomings in the spec and work together to improve the ecosystem instead of arguing about who’s shit smells worse. Reinventing the wheel isn’t the answer. Lock-in isn’t the answer. This is why I believe that next generation of frameworks will converge on custom elements as an interoperable component model, enhance that model by sprinkling in awesome features of their own, and focus more on flavors (class-based, functional, signals, etc.) and higher level functionality. As for today's frameworks? How they adapt will determine how relevant they remain. Living dangerously # Ryan concludes: So in a sense there are nothing wrong with Web Components as they are only able to be what they are. It's the promise that they are something that they aren't which is so dangerous. The way their existence warps everything around them that puts the whole web at risk. It's a price everyone has to pay. So Web Components aren’t the specific vision you had for components. That's fine. But that's how it is. They're not Solid components. They’re not React components. They’re not Svelte components. They’re not Vue components. They’re standards-based Web Components that work in all of the above. And they could work even better in all of the above if all of the above were interested in advancing the platform instead of locking users in. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I find interesting the number of people who are and have been sponsored and/or hired by for-profit companies whose platforms rely heavily on said frameworks. Do you think it’s in their best interest to follow Web Standards if that means making their service less relevant and less lucrative? Of course not. If you’ve built an empire on top of something, there’s absolutely zero incentive to tear it down for the betterment of humanity. That’s not how capitalism works. It’s far more profitable to lock users in and keep them paying. But you know what…? Web Standards don't give a fuck about monetization. Longevity supersedes ingenuity # The last thing I’d like to talk about is this line here. Web Components possibly pose the biggest risk to the future of the web that I can see. Of course, this is from the perspective of a framework author, not from the people actually shipping and maintaining software built using these frameworks. And the people actually shipping software are the majority, but that’s not prestigious so they rarely get the high follower counts. The people actually shipping software are tired of framework churn. They're tired of shit they wrote last month being outdated already. They want stability. They want to know that the stuff they build today will work tomorrow. As history has proven, no framework can promise that. You know what framework I want to use? I want a framework that aligns with the platform, not one that replaces it. I want a framework that values incremental innovation over user lock-in. I want a framework that says it's OK to break things if it means making the Web a better place for everyone. Yes, that comes at a cost, but almost every good investment does, and I would argue that cost will be less expensive than learning a new framework and rebuilding buttons for the umpteenth time. The Web platform may not be perfect, but it continuously gets better. I don’t think frameworks are bad but, as a community, we need to recognize that a fundamental piece of the platform has changed and it's time to embrace the interoperable component model that Web Component APIs have given us…even if that means breaking things to get there. The component war is over.
Components are like little machines. You build them once. Use them whenever you need them. Every now and then you open them up to oil them or replace a part, then you send them back to work. And work, they do. Little component machines just chugging along so you never have to write them from scratch ever again. Adapted from this tweet.
I've been struggling with the idea of reflecting attributes in custom elements and when it's appropriate. I think I've identified a gap in the platform, but I'm not sure exactly how we should fill it. I'll explain with an example. Let's say I want to make a simple badge component with primary, secondary, and tertiary variants. <my-badge variant="primary">foo</my-badge> <my-badge variant="secondary">bar</my-badge> <my-badge variant="tertiary">baz</my-badge> This is a simple component, but one that demonstrates the problem well. I want to style the badge based on the variant property, but sprouting attributes (which occurs as a result of reflecting a property back to an attribute) is largely considered a bad practice. A lot of web component libraries do it out of necessary to facilitate styling — including Shoelace — but is there a better way? The problem # I need to style the badge without relying on reflected attributes. This means I can't use :host([variant="..."]) because the attribute may or may not be set by the user. For example, if the component is rendered in a framework that sets properties instead of attributes, or if the property is set or changed programmatically, the attribute will be out of sync and my styles will be broken. So how can I style the badge based its variants without reflection? Let's assume we have the following internals, which is all we really need for the badge. <my-badge> #shadowRoot <slot></slot> </my-badge> What can we do about it? # I can't add classes to the slot, because :host(:has(.slot-class)) won't match. I can't set a data attribute on the host element, because that's the same as reflection and might cause issues with SSR and DOM morphing libraries. I could add a wrapper element around the slot and apply classes to it, but I'd prefer not to bloat the internals with additional elements. With a wrapper, users would have to use ::part(wrapper) to target it. Without the wrapper, they can set background, border, and other CSS properties directly on the host element which is more desirable. I could add custom states for each variant, but this gets messy for non-Boolean values and feels like an abuse of the API. Filling the gap # I'm not sure what the best solution is or could be, but one thing that comes to mind is a way to provide some kind of cross-root version of :has that works with :host. Something akin to: :host(:has-in-shadow-root(.some-selector)) { /* maybe one day… */ } If you have any thoughts on this one, hit me up on Twitter.
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I’ve long been interested in new and different platforms. I ran Debian on an Alpha back in the late 1990s and was part of the Alpha port team; then I helped bootstrap Debian on amd64. I’ve got somewhere around 8 Raspberry Pi devices in active use right now, and the free NNCPNET Internet email service … Continue reading ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V) →
In my first interview out of college I was asked the change counter problem: Given a set of coin denominations, find the minimum number of coins required to make change for a given number. IE for USA coinage and 37 cents, the minimum number is four (quarter, dime, 2 pennies). I implemented the simple greedy algorithm and immediately fell into the trap of the question: the greedy algorithm only works for "well-behaved" denominations. If the coin values were [10, 9, 1], then making 37 cents would take 10 coins in the greedy algorithm but only 4 coins optimally (10+9+9+9). The "smart" answer is to use a dynamic programming algorithm, which I didn't know how to do. So I failed the interview. But you only need dynamic programming if you're writing your own algorithm. It's really easy if you throw it into a constraint solver like MiniZinc and call it a day. int: total; array[int] of int: values = [10, 9, 1]; array[index_set(values)] of var 0..: coins; constraint sum (c in index_set(coins)) (coins[c] * values[c]) == total; solve minimize sum(coins); You can try this online here. It'll give you a prompt to put in total and then give you successively-better solutions: coins = [0, 0, 37]; ---------- coins = [0, 1, 28]; ---------- coins = [0, 2, 19]; ---------- coins = [0, 3, 10]; ---------- coins = [0, 4, 1]; ---------- coins = [1, 3, 0]; ---------- Lots of similar interview questions are this kind of mathematical optimization problem, where we have to find the maximum or minimum of a function corresponding to constraints. They're hard in programming languages because programming languages are too low-level. They are also exactly the problems that constraint solvers were designed to solve. Hard leetcode problems are easy constraint problems.1 Here I'm using MiniZinc, but you could just as easily use Z3 or OR-Tools or whatever your favorite generalized solver is. More examples This was a question in a different interview (which I thankfully passed): Given a list of stock prices through the day, find maximum profit you can get by buying one stock and selling one stock later. It's easy to do in O(n^2) time, or if you are clever, you can do it in O(n). Or you could be not clever at all and just write it as a constraint problem: array[int] of int: prices = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; var int: buy; var int: sell; var int: profit = prices[sell] - prices[buy]; constraint sell > buy; constraint profit > 0; solve maximize profit; Reminder, link to trying it online here. While working at that job, one interview question we tested out was: Given a list, determine if three numbers in that list can be added or subtracted to give 0? This is a satisfaction problem, not a constraint problem: we don't need the "best answer", any answer will do. We eventually decided against it for being too tricky for the engineers we were targeting. But it's not tricky in a solver; include "globals.mzn"; array[int] of int: numbers = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; array[index_set(numbers)] of var {0, -1, 1}: choices; constraint sum(n in index_set(numbers)) (numbers[n] * choices[n]) = 0; constraint count(choices, -1) + count(choices, 1) = 3; solve satisfy; Okay, one last one, a problem I saw last year at Chipy AlgoSIG. Basically they pick some leetcode problems and we all do them. I failed to solve this one: Given an array of integers heights representing the histogram's bar height where the width of each bar is 1, return the area of the largest rectangle in the histogram. The "proper" solution is a tricky thing involving tracking lots of bookkeeping states, which you can completely bypass by expressing it as constraints: array[int] of int: numbers = [2,1,5,6,2,3]; var 1..length(numbers): x; var 1..length(numbers): dx; var 1..: y; constraint x + dx <= length(numbers); constraint forall (i in x..(x+dx)) (y <= numbers[i]); var int: area = (dx+1)*y; solve maximize area; output ["(\(x)->\(x+dx))*\(y) = \(area)"] There's even a way to automatically visualize the solution (using vis_geost_2d), but I didn't feel like figuring it out in time for the newsletter. Is this better? Now if I actually brought these questions to an interview the interviewee could ruin my day by asking "what's the runtime complexity?" Constraint solvers runtimes are unpredictable and almost always than an ideal bespoke algorithm because they are more expressive, in what I refer to as the capability/tractability tradeoff. But even so, they'll do way better than a bad bespoke algorithm, and I'm not experienced enough in handwriting algorithms to consistently beat a solver. The real advantage of solvers, though, is how well they handle new constraints. Take the stock picking problem above. I can write an O(n²) algorithm in a few minutes and the O(n) algorithm if you give me some time to think. Now change the problem to Maximize the profit by buying and selling up to max_sales stocks, but you can only buy or sell one stock at a given time and you can only hold up to max_hold stocks at a time? That's a way harder problem to write even an inefficient algorithm for! While the constraint problem is only a tiny bit more complicated: include "globals.mzn"; int: max_sales = 3; int: max_hold = 2; array[int] of int: prices = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; array [1..max_sales] of var int: buy; array [1..max_sales] of var int: sell; array [index_set(prices)] of var 0..max_hold: stocks_held; var int: profit = sum(s in 1..max_sales) (prices[sell[s]] - prices[buy[s]]); constraint forall (s in 1..max_sales) (sell[s] > buy[s]); constraint profit > 0; constraint forall(i in index_set(prices)) (stocks_held[i] = (count(s in 1..max_sales) (buy[s] <= i) - count(s in 1..max_sales) (sell[s] <= i))); constraint alldifferent(buy ++ sell); solve maximize profit; output ["buy at \(buy)\n", "sell at \(sell)\n", "for \(profit)"]; Most constraint solving examples online are puzzles, like Sudoku or "SEND + MORE = MONEY". Solving leetcode problems would be a more interesting demonstration. And you get more interesting opportunities to teach optimizations, like symmetry breaking. Because my dad will email me if I don't explain this: "leetcode" is slang for "tricky algorithmic interview questions that have little-to-no relevance in the actual job you're interviewing for." It's from leetcode.com. ↩
I’m something of a filesystem geek, I guess. I first wrote about ZFS on Linux 14 years ago, and even before I used ZFS, I had used ext2/3/4, jfs, reiserfs, xfs, and no doubt some others. I’ve also used btrfs. I last posted about it in 2014, when I noted it has some advantages over … Continue reading btrfs on a Raspberry Pi →
Something like a channel changer, for the web. That's what the idea was at first. But it led to a whole new path of discovery that even the site's creators couldn't have predicted. The post Stumbling upon appeared first on The History of the Web.
