Web Components for the Unambitious (JavaScript conference submission)

README.md

Web Components for the Unambitious

"Custom Elements are the best thing since sliced bread!" — That's the actual reaction of most friends and colleagues after introducing them to this newly minted Web standard. Whether you're currently writing jQuery plugins or React/Angular/… applications, being familiar with Web Components can be a huge relief on any front-end project — all with a surprisingly small investment and without necessarily reconsidering your fundamental approach.

Recent years have seen a myriad of frameworks attempting to make it easier to build component-based UIs, continually advancing the state of the art in positive ways. And yet, developers are left with the agonizing choice of selecting one of these frameworks as the foundation for their application, which also means weighing far-reaching architectural trade-offs early on.

Web Components draw on those lessons, but benefit from being a native part of the browser platform. As such, they make for an inexpensive, straightforward foundation for UI components which are interoperable across projects.

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[presentation]

In this talk, we'll walk you through how gradually switching to Web Components on a public website made the project more robust, fast and future-proof. Relying on the modern Web's fundamentals means our architecture is fairly unassuming and avoids technological excitement — which is exactly what made this endeavor a pleasure to work on.

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[workshop]

In this workshop, we'll introduce you to vanilla Web Components by writing a simple application from scratch. Along the way, we'll cover declarative and imperative aspects, data flow and various best practices. We recommend participants have a decent grasp of JavaScript and are familiar with the basics of DOM manipulation.

My impression: This abstract is probably a tad too long. More importantly, it all feels a bit disjointed, with too many loose ends and no clear indication of what we'll actually be talking about (e.g. API basics, SPA hate, migrating from jQuery to custom elements).

But perhaps that's inevitable and this is good enough?

An abstract for a presentation must have more punch. It must state its intent unequivocally. It must use parallelism to emphasize.

An abstract -- albeit one which is attempting to be, at once, for a presentation or workshop -- loses strength, distracts its reader, diffuses the audience, when it (because of certain predilection of its prolix author) runs on, in a roundabout way, without stating its point. It may, you'll come to realize, be better to be forthright and assertive and not guide the reader down the primrose path to your message; neither lead nor follow, be merely true.