progressive enhancement

Progressive Web Components

2 months ago

Web components face issues like layout shifts, flash of unstyled content, poor SSR support, heavy JavaScript reliance, framework incompatibility, and accessibility challenges.
Progressive Web Components address these problems by using a two-layer design: a base HTML/CSS layer for immediate rendering and a JavaScript layer for interactivity.
Elena is a 2.6kB library that enables building Progressive Web Components, focusing on HTML and CSS first with progressive JavaScript enhancement.
Elena supports SSR by allowing components without render() to be fully SSR-compatible, and components with render() to partially render with optional server-side utilities.
Key features of Elena include lightweight size, progressive enhancement, semantic accessibility, standards-based architecture, reactive updates, scoped styles, SSR support, zero dependencies, and zero framework lock-in.
The library includes packages like @elenajs/core, @elenajs/bundler, @elenajs/cli, @elenajs/ssr, and @elenajs/mcp for building and managing web component libraries.
Elena's v1.0.0-rc.7 is released with features for product teams, such as batched reactive re-renders and clean CSS encapsulation.