Past technologies used in web development and Current Web Components

Web Components are the features that are most useful in web development. These components are as follows:

• Shadow DOM
• Template
• Custom Elements
• HTML imports.

We will discuss about these components in detail here. So, let’s begin our journey:

Web Components:

Most of the people are not completely familiar with these web components and there are some who speculate little bit about them. Using components is a very old web practice but now this is again coming into trend.

Today, web applications are very much complex and these are mostly managed on the server by dividing the application in different pages where every page requires user navigation to navigate the browser from one page to another.

Using Java and other related capabilities, the need to navigate from different web pages has reduced to an extent. For some common situations like as reading email or news, users have very few expectations.

Once you login to your email then you might be running your email application from a very single URL and be there on the same page the whole day. Client side web applications can be more complex.

A very useful solution to solve this complexity is to use sufficient components and leave logic for a single web page or document. The goal of every web component is to reduce complexity so that functions can be performed within a single page context.

How components can be used?

Web components must include HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These models are currently supported by technology that is contributed to various scenarios which are useful to maintain the web components.
Such independent isolation models consist of:

• CSS style isolation
• JavaScript and Scopes
• Global object isolation
• Element encapsulation

Let’s understand these in detail:

• CSS style isolation: Components cannot be used natively in CSS today. A component model must support some ways to separate certain sets of CSS from another in such a way that rules of both sets don’t interfere with each other.Component styles must be applied to the required parts of the components. In a separate style sheet, CSS styles are applied to the document with necessary selectors. These selectors are considered in such a way that it should be easily applied to the complete document.Hence, there reach is completely global. This can sometime lead to real conflicts when several contributors of any project put CSS files together. Duplicate selectors must have well established presence.

  This problem has several solutions and among these, one is to transfer elements as well as related styles of single component from primary document to a very different document. This seems awkward to completely rely on JavaScript for settling styles over the boundary which seems like a gap in CSS.

• JavaScript and Scopes: All the Java Scripts used in any web page can access the same shared global object. Similar to any other programming language, JavaScript has offers a degree of privacy for certain function codes.These scopes are used to separate variables and functions from the global environment. At present, the module pattern in Java is used the most and it has emerged from a definite need for multi JavaScript frameworks that live together in a single global environment.Lexical scopes serve as the only isolation boundary code which can connect the contents of both scopes and the code outside the scope will not be able to approach the scope’s contents.

  The code in the lexical scope can hide itself from the environment. These JavaScript codes tend to offer a closing component in such a way that its contents are reasonably private.

• Global Object Isolation: There are certain codes which may not share access to the global environment. The examples of such codes are Ads and Ad frameworks. To assure the accuracy of Java code, one must run an untrusted code in a separate environment.An entire new global object is taken by the developers so that they can code without any concerns for other scripts and to do that the most popular tool called Worker can be used however this tool lacks the access to different elements.Several points are to be considered while designing a component. Isolated components are not developed completely till the initial set of web components is locked down. Global object isolation fills an important scenario for different web components.
• Element encapsulation: Different iframe elements such as object elements, framesets and imperative window.open() API has the ability to manage a subtree of separate elements. There are several components that function within the document, with iframe all the HTML documents are combined together in such a way that two different web applications are co located inside the other.Every element has a unique document URL, global scripting environment and CSS Scope. Each document is completely different from another. iFrames serve as the best form of componentization on the web.Using this code, different applications can be collaborated with each other. There are various websites that use iframes as a component to enable everything. JavaScript codes within one html document can breach into the isolation boundary of another document.

  This capacity to violate iframe’s isolation boundary can be a required feature but this can sometimes be a security risk at times when the iframe content includes sensitive information which cannot be shared with anybody.

These are the technologies that were used to improve HTML’s iframe features. But today, the scenario is totally different. The web components that are used today are as follows:

• Custom elements
• Shadow DOM
• Template element
• HTML imports
• Custom Properties

And those for coming generation are as follows:

• Declarative Shadow DOM
• Completely isolated components
• Accessibility primitives
• Specified native control styling
• CSS Parts styling
• Parser customization

Wind Up

Web components are those that completely transform the web and all the plans related to the support and journey will be discussed here. We hope that this blog post will be useful to all the web developers to understand web components deeply.

For more such information, stay tuned with Softqube Technologies, Web Development company in India.