Libraries for building web components

When you begin your journey as a developer, you learn that you should reuse code as much as possible. For front-end development, though, it is not so easy. When you have to create custom markup structures, they end up in being complex in style and script and using them multiple times can turn your page into a mess. Web Components, that are called the building blocks of web applications, promise to solve such problems.

Web components are a set of web platform APIs that allow us to create custom, reusable and encapsulated HTML tags for web pages and web apps. Such custom components and widgets build on the established standards, can work across various browsers, and can be used with any JavaScript library or framework that works with HTML.

Web components incorporate four (in certain classifications, three) main technologies that can be used together to create versatile custom elements with encapsulated and reusable functionality:

Example:

As you can see, custom elements (in this case, <component-example>) must in some way extend an HTMLElement in order to be registered with the browser.

Example:

To attach a shadow root, we should run something like:

Example:

The example above doesn’t render any content until a script has consumes the template, instantiates the code and tells the browser what to do with it.

Example:

Web Components provide multiple benefits for developers and business.

Benefits for code:

Benefits for project

Generally speaking, using a custom element is no different to using a <div> or any other element. Instances can be declared on the page, created dynamically in JavaScript, event listeners can be attached, and so on.

Many libraries already exist that make it easier to build web components, including the following that we find useful:

HTML and DOM specs already add features to support web components, letting web developers easily extend HTML with new elements with encapsulated styling and custom behavior. This proves that web components are already our present and it is time we start using them in applications.

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