Developing Upwards

It is the opinion of this developer that HTML Imports, championed by the Polymer Project and already implemented in the Blink fork of WebKit, are utterly and completely useless. Beyond this base uselessness, I believe HTML Imports are actively and wildly harmful. I believe the more they are used, the more problems they’re going to cause. The Case For HTML Imports Giving the new feature their fair shot, I’ll lay out the case in favor of HTML Imports. I was actually pretty excited about them when I first read the details, and even when I first started using them. Unique loading of resources without double loading, such as when two imports each themselves import a shared dependency. is really cool! We’re building pretty complicated JS loading systems to solve what, here, is a built-in feature. The collection of scripts, markup, and styles associated with single units of behavior is really great as a way to conceptualize of how you’re pulling in these web components. It just mak...

Wow! Web Components are amazing! Honestly, despite the negative title of this post I'm absolutely floored with excitement for this new set of technologies. This post is my exercise in grounding my excitement a bit with some reality discovered in actually using them in a serious project, and the issues we've run against and had to deal with. Web Components are an important part of the future of web development, and libraries like Polymer and X-Tags mean we can use much of their power today, without waiting browser support (which is already under way!) Like so many new technologies, this is also incomplete. It may be fair, it would be more accurate to say the ecosystem around Web Components is not mature , than to blame Web Components directly. Ecosystems are extremely important. Therefore, the items listed here are the parts of an ecosystem that I believe we need built around this new set of technologies. Missing Item 1: Routing Now this one took me by surprise because,...