[Developer Needs Dashboard] Web Component Updates

[EisenbergEffect]

A few things I see in the dashboard are out of date:

• Declarative Shadow DOM is already implemented everywhere. So, I'm not sure it needs to be in the dashboard, if the goal is to track features that still need doing. If we want to track overall progress, consider some re-design of the dashboard so that we can see the work that is complete and track those as successes of the effort. Put DSD in that section, along with CSS Nesting, Text directionality, backdrop-filter, and popover.
• Customizable built-in elements are "dead". I wouldn't even list them. At TPAC 2023 we resolved to pursue an alternative approach, which can be thought of as "Custom Attributes". That's what should probably be listed in its place.

I would encourage folks to take a look at the Web Components CG 2023 TPAC report, which provides the results of developer surveys around the most requested features related to Web Components. The top requests gathered from the community were:

• Declarative Shadow DOM (shipped)
• Scoped Registries
• Cross-root Aria
• CSS Slot Content Detection

For cross-root aria, there have been a number of proposals, but the one that folks want to see move forward is Reference Target for Cross-root ARIA. I can't stress enough how important this is to address many long-term accessibility challenges.

Beyond these features, there was huge interest at TPAC in Declarative Custom Elements, across all engine implementors and the community. On X I conducted a survey with over 400 responses, which yielded the following community interest in a declarative model for Web Components:

• 26.3% of respondents indicated that a declarative model is the way that Web Components should have been standardized from the beginning.
• An additional 33.7% of respondents indicated that they wanted to use a declarative model for Web Components.
• 27% of respondents had interest and would use a declarative model for Web Components, depending on the details.
• Only 12.9% of respondents had no interest in declarative Web Components.

Altogether, about 60% of all respondents were anxious to have and use a declarative API for Web Components now and about 87% of respondents were interested in some way, depending on the details of the API. Such a large community interest seems to indicate that at least exploring a potential standard is in order.

Survey Notes

I asked those who responded "maybe" or "no" to provide me with some additional explanation behind their response. This turned out to be quite interesting, indicating that some "maybe" responses were more likely to be "yes" and that some "no" responses were more like "maybe". Furthermore, some of the "no" responses came from people who weren't Web Developers and had no interest in the Web Platform, skewing the numbers a bit. Based on these additional insights, the community signal is likely even more positive than the numbers above show.

[dandclark]

Hi @EisenbergEffect, thanks for the feedback! We're still refining the inclusion criteria, but the initial set of features we included have both a mature-ish spec and non-tentative WPT tests (though as pointed out in #787 we should update the dashboard to reflect these criteria more clearly). I don't think Scoped Registries, Cross-root Aria, and CSS Slot Content Detection meet that bar yet.

That's not to say they aren't important for developers; we're going to regularly revisit the set of features included here and these will be strong contenders as specs and tests are developed.