A Beginner's Guide to Web Components: The Future of Building Reusable UI Elements

Imagine you’re building a Lego set. Every single piece fits no matter where you put it or how many times you use it. Now, imagine Web Components as the Lego blocks of web development – reusable, self-contained blocks that can be plugged in any web page or web app to speed up development time, write modular and consistent code in less lines, and if-build once, reuse them across different projects just like using a single Lego block to build various structures.

In this blog post, we will be diving deep into the world of Web Components, what they actually are, why they’re important, how you can use them and examples.

What Are Web Components?

Web Components are a suite of different technologies allowing you to create reusable custom elements— with their functionality encapsulated away from the rest of your code — and utilize them in your web apps. So, Web Components is basically a set of web platform APIs that provide you with a way to create new custom, reusable, encapsulated HTML tags to use in web pages and web apps.

To break it down very simply: Web components are like HTML tags that come with their own powerful features!

The technology stack of web components consists out of three main pillars:

Custom Elements: you can define your own HTML elements.

• Example: could be a custom button with specific styles and behabior.

Shadow DOM: Web components can have a DOM structure associated with them which is local to that component, and doesn’t leak out into the main document.

• Example: A web component’s internal CSS won’t pollute other parts of your page accidentally.

HTML Templates: It lets you define the structure and content of a web component in a reusable way.

• Example: You can create a template for user profile card and use it multiple time on a page with different data.

Why Are Web Components Important?

Web development has always been about reusability and scalability. As applications get more complex, we need a way to build modular, maintainable code. Web components allow you to create your own custom HTML elements that work across frameworks or even without a framework.

Here’s why web components are important:

1. Framework Agnostic: Since web components work natively in the browser, you can use them with any project, whether it’s built with React, Angular, Vue, or no framework at all.
2. Reusability: Once you create a web component, you can use that same component across multiple projects or pages without having to rewrite the code.
3. Encapsulation: The Shadow DOM ensures that a component’s internal styles and behavior are fully isolated from the rest of the page, so they can’t unintentionally impact other parts of your app.
4. Interoperability: Web components work great alongside existing HTML elements and other web technologies.

How Do Web Components Work?

Let’s break down how to create a simple web component step by step.

Step 1: Creating a Custom Element

Custom elements allow you to define new HTML tags. Here’s an example of creating a custom button:

Now, you can use your custom element just like any other HTML tag:

Step 2: Using Shadow DOM for Encapsulation

The Shadow DOM is like a protective bubble around your component. It ensures that the component’s internal styles won’t affect the rest of the page.

Here’s how to add a Shadow DOM to the custom button:

The button inside the shadow DOM now has its own styles, and those styles won’t interfere with other buttons on the page.

Step 3: Using HTML Templates for Reusability

HTML templates allow you to define reusable content. Let’s create a simple template for a user profile card:

Now, we can use this template inside a web component:

And you can use the component like this:

Benefits of Web Components

1. Reusability Across Projects: After you’ve built a web component, you can use it in any project no matter the framework. Same button for 5 apps? Plug it in. No rebuild required.
2. Encapsulation with Shadow DOM : Shadow DOM make sure that the styles of your component don’t accidentally ruin other parts of the page. Your component stays self-contained and out of trouble.
3. Improved Collaboration: Web components allow developers to collaborate much more effectively. Once a developer creates a component (e.g. button or form), other team members can use it without having to worry about anything except the usage.
4. Performance: Web components are native browser constructs, so they are very lightweight and far outperform third-party libraries or frameworks that you have to load.

Example: Using Web Components in an E-Commerce Site

Imagine you're building an e-commerce website that sells products. You want to display product cards that show the product image, name, and price.

With web components, you can create a reusable product card component that works across all product pages.

Product Card Component:

Using the Product Card Component:

With this setup, you can use the same element for multiple products across your website without duplicating code.

Cons of Web Components

While there are a lot of good things about web components, they do have some challenges:

1. Browser Support: While modern browsers support web components, old ones (like how obscure Internet Explorer is) don’t. You may need to use polyfills to keep compatibility in check.
2. Learning Curve: If you’re new to web development, wrapping your head around custom elements, Shadow DOM and templates can be daunting at first.
3. Styling Challenges: Shadow DOM is great for encapsulation but it does make styling a bit tricky, especially if you have to apply global styles to web components.
4. Interoperability with Frameworks: Web components will work with almost every modern framework. When you start trying to integrate them into an older framework or library, you’ll likely run into a lot of issues.

Future of Web Components:

Web components are a standard way of building modular and reusable UI elements. It’s being adopted by many big organizations like Google, Salesforce etc in their products. Browsers are improving their support, and as more developers start using this technology, future seems bright for web components.

Well I hope by now you’ve got the basic idea about what Web Components are and how they can simplify your web development, Don’t worry if have not understood everything, just keep practicing, its easier than you think to build reusable components with web component standards.

Thanks for reading!! See you again in my next article with some fun topic!