Codementor session with Benny Powers

Background and Requirements

1. There is a lot about HTTP and HTML I don't know, including probably a lot of the basics.

2. I hope that our session will not take more than 30 minutes and that any minutes beyond that will be billed on a prorated basis, not in 15-minute increments.

3. I am writing a set of BiwaScheme functions and macros to add web components to a page using BiwaScheme's foreign function interface. I want to learn what methods and event handlers to write so that a web app authored on the fly in BiwaScheme-in-the-browser will have all normal but basic capabilities. By on the fly I mean a whole web app will be created interactively by a person at BiwaScheme's console in the browser, for possible later "compilation" into HTML+JavaScript+CSS and posting to the web server to be served as a regular web page or web app. The macro define-event-handler is my interface to BiwaScheme's interface to JavaScript events.

   By basic, I mean nonspecialized, nothing as complex as drag-and-drop or multimedia (at least not yet). Perhaps going through just the programmatic creation of a web component for a button would be enough for my learning. Hopefully even a nontechnical person should be able to understand the connections between the components and their actions. See Mashweb.Club and my sequentially programmed web app. (Skip down to the Scheme code in the section 'Try It Now'. I think you'll be able to read the code even if you never encountered Scheme before.)

4. I want to use web components from a good, well-known library or catalog, so I want to learn what libraries and catalogs would meet my needs. The library or catalog should support three or four of the standards that make up web components v1 and should work with 99% of web agents (mainly browsers) that were up to date as far back as a few years ago (say, 3 to 5 years). I'm not sure whether I should want the components to support the HTML template standard. I don't mind using a polyfill if it is small and fast (slow-mobile-friendly).

   I want to avoid complications like BEM (Block Element Modifier) if such complications are unnecessary due to the evolution of the standards and the browsers. It appears that Material Components for the Web uses BEM. See, for example, Button.

5. I want a simple but fully backward compatible button and other replacements for standard HTML elements so that I can standardize my design system and encapsulate my web components' styles. I want these replacements to be usable wherever standard HTML elements are usable. They should be just as nestable as standard HTML elements are. I want to learn which components of the selected libraries and catalogs will serve these purposes.

6. I believe that most elements, whether standard or custom, can take care of many or most of their own responses to events in the sense that no JavaScript is necessary to respond to such events as focus, blur, pagehide, animationstart, etc. See MDN's event reference. I want to learn whether I am correct or not about this assumption.

7. The types of data binding used by standard HTML elements should work with the web components: methods like submit, keydown, keyup, keypress, click, mousedown, mouseup, mouseenter, mouseleave, mousemove, mouseover, touchend, touchmove, touchstart, etc. Basically, at a minimum boring web apps should be supported. I want to learn the standard APIs necessary to author any boring web app.