It's been three years since I broke ground on Shoelace 2.0. Between then and now, the project has amassed over 300 million monthly hits on jsDelivr and, as of today, it is jsDelivr's 73rd most popular project.

Although Shoelace is a web component library, it ships React wrappers that lets you use the library idiomatically in React. This video shows you how to install Shoelace in a brand new Create React App.

Similar to how every custom element must contain a dash, I like to pretend that every custom event must also contain a dash. This removes all ambiguity between native events and custom events.

The topic of custom element event names comes up every now and then, especially from Shoelace users who get confused when events of the same name are emitted from different components.

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.