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Discussion on: Lets Build Web Components! Part 8: Mythbusters Edition

 
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Westbrook Johnson

This is a great point Samwise, there is a lot of ambiguity around this. I'm gonna show you one way that you can address this, but I'd be very interested in knowing whether you have a non-web component example of how this might be possible. Knowing what the explicit goals you might have is half the battle when it comes to architecting a useful solution. What I share below will be useful for some requirement, but likely not all, in this area.

In so far as you want a library free (except the polyfills) approach to passing rich data into a web component, I offer the following:

There are certainly things that could be said against this approach. In particular, the idea that JSON.parse() prevents the maintenance of identity is a big one. In response to that, I'd question how someone would actually rely on the idea of setting data as attributes beyond the initial load of a page. In that case, setting an initial identity that then can be maintained inside of the application by passing properties (theoretically you'd be in/have access to the JS scope at that point, so it would look like otherElement.customProperty = y) would absolve that issue.

What other use cases for communicating rich data between web components have you run into? I look forward to hearing about it! I think this is a really interesting part of the web components conversation, and techniques established and discovered in this area will benefit well beyond simply trying to set rich data on an element.