It's been more than two years since the beta release of Shoelace 2.0, which was the first version of the project to ship Web Components. What started off as a fun side project has quickly grown to become one of the most recognized Web Component libraries in the world. As of today, Shoelace receives more than 100 million monthly CDN hits on jsDelivr, and that number continues to grow.

Gather 'round, it's story time.

In the early days of Web browsers, it was extremely common to see user agent checks in JavaScript. Sometimes, you'd write the same code in two or three different ways to support various browsers. Code such as that shown below allowed webpages to work in browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, who didn't always agree on how features should be implemented.

There's a post from 2016 entitled Buttons shouldn't have a hand cursor that's been making its way around social media this week. While the author is correct in his statement that operating system buttons don't have hand cursors, the pattern has become ubiquitous and somewhat expected on the Web.

I recently added this to Shoelace's contribution guidelines, which sums up my position on AI-generated code.

Buttons are one of my favorite components. On the surface they seem simple, but in practice, they tend to be much more involved. In a post by Nathan Curtis entitled And you thought buttons were easy?, he demonstrates how costs can quickly skyrocket to $1,000,000 when one arm of the organization isn't aware of what the other is doing.

In a previous post, I explored valid names for CSS parts and discovered that there are very few restrictions in what you can call them. The purpose of that deep dive was to help identify a pattern for naming parts that lets me expose states and subparts, or parts exported as a result of composition.

I was recently asked a really good question on Twitter: when shouldn't an element be a CSS Part?

CSS Shadow Parts, colloquially known as CSS Parts, are used to expose elements inside a web component's shadow root so they can be styled by consumers with CSS. But what are we allowed to call these parts? What characters comprise a valid CSS part name? To find out, I had to dive into the spec!

We live in a world where front end developers are fatigued from the framework wars. Most have settled into a niche — especially the React crowd — and they’re happy to not have to think outside that box. They are, by far, the hardest crowd to sell web components to.