Top all-time · #2826
Dimitri Glazkov
Personal blog · glazkov.comprogrammingweb
Dimitri Glazkov's personal blog at glazkov.com covers programming and web. Since 2011, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “What the Heck is Shadow DOM?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dimitri Glazkov's blog mainly for its explanations of Shadow DOM, such as the 2011 'What the heck is shadow DOM' post, and for his 'Sailors and Pirates' framing of rule followers and rule breakers.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Self and About
Most-linked posts?
- What the Heck is Shadow DOM?8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-01-15
- Shadow DOM as Web Component gristle2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-29
- Four Layers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-31
- What the Heck Is Shadow DOM?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-20
What Hacker News says?
Adapton is definitely an inspiration, and I have cited it in previous iterations (and even had it in an earlier draft - if you check the Markdown source, the link def is still there). Here's my current thinking on the topic. It all depends on whether you want to model your problem as a tree or a graph (see also [1] for some great discussion of that tension). If you model your problem as a graph, then a general purpo…
Comment linking /2022/02/06/tension-between-graphs-and-trees/
on “Xilem: An Architecture for UI in Rust”Submitted What the Heck is Shadow DOM? as a story · 53 points
HN discussion(Disclaimer: author and editor of the modern custom elements spec here.) The specific "failed promise" that I see is largely this positioning of web components vs. frameworks. How web components was originally envisioned was as leaf-node or light-DOM-using components, of the sort HTML already has. For example, <dialog>, <details>, <input type=range>, etc. Web components was supposed to give you the tools to create y…
Comment linking /2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/
on “The Failed Promise of Web Components”Submitted Shadow DOM as Web Component gristle as a story · 18 points
HN discussionShadow DOM is a very, very bad idea. http://glazkov.com/2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/ It kills cross-browser compatibility, kills standards (since they're unreachable, undocumented elements that can handle input, interaction and affect other elements.
Comment linking /2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/
on ““The working group should not agree to freeze whatever syntax Chrome ships””Submitted Four Layers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI use shadow DOM every day, but yes, it is often the part of WCs that baffles people – probably because they don't need it. Alternative approaches that may work for your use case: - "HTML web components" [1] - light DOM only, SSR-first, good as a replacement for "jQuery sprinkles" - "Shadow gristle" [2] - use as little shadow DOM as possible. If you need styling or composition, put it in the light DOM! [1]: https://…
Comment linking /2023/03/02/shadow-gristle/
on “Web components are okay”Submitted Going Forward Is Leaving Past Behind as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe DOM is indeed too low-level. We need higher-level components, and the ability to develop custom components. We also need a way to firewall segments of a page, so we can reason about it at a higher level of abstraction. This technology is coming, it's called shadow dom ( http://glazkov.com/2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/ ). I've been developing a 100.000 line single page javascript app for the past few ye…
Comment linking /2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/
on “Changing times for web developers”Submitted What the heck is shadow DOM? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIn my experience orgs need a mix of both rule followers and rule breakers to function. I really like Dimitri Glazkov's "Sailors and Pirates" framing of this: https://glazkov.com/2023/04/02/sailors-and-pirates/
Comment linking /2023/04/02/sailors-and-pirates/
on “Dangerous advice for software engineers”Submitted Deep Stack Engineer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere has been a good deal of talk over the years of making form controls stylable[1]; a few, like buttons, already are, and WebKit has some vendor-specific extensions for things like scrollbars[2]. But it will take quite a bit of work to hash out standards, and a lot of implementation work in all of the major browsers to get it there. The WebKit scrollbars use a whole bunch of pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes, bu…
Comment linking /2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/
on “The Current State of HTML5 Forms”Submitted The Rise of Makers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou use a JavaScript polyfill which handles browsers which don't yet support them. For example, I recently launched a project using <input type=range> with a [modernizr.load]( http://modernizr.com/docs/#load ) test which uses https://github.com/freqdec/fd-slider if the browser doesn't have native support. As for styling the native controls, I generally recommend thinking twice about that as the usability benefits of…
Comment linking /2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom&
on “A Guide to the New HTML5 Form Input Types”Submitted Four Layers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don’t think cascading is necessarily a problem; rather, HTML/CSS lacks good encapsulation features. Actually, this has been well-recognized by browser vendors, who want to use HTML and CSS to implement things like HTML5 video player UIs, but don’t want the styles of the page itself to interfere with the video player. They’ve implemented a rather intricate system called the "shadow DOM" to manage this. (This page e…
Comment linking /2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/
on “Separation, Abstraction, and Cascading in CSS”Submitted Porcelains as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is actually pretty useful. Basically, it lets you do something like this: document.createElement('slider') Or just write it in HTML like this: <slider></slider> And as soon as the page is about to render it, the script intercepts it and turns it into something like this (with styles, events, etc): <div class="slider"><div class="slider-knob">O</div></div> You could write a jQuery plugin that does this, however…
Comment linking /2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/
on “Create your own custom HTML tags/component...TODAY”Submitted Schemish as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's related to something called the Shadow DOM ( http://glazkov.com/2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/ ) ( http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/intro-to-shadow-dom--net-... ) and our friends the render-engine makers just had a big internal 'argument' about the wisdom of exposing it [Encapsulation !] and how. Where it is accessible -- Chrome -- things are pretty sketchy. Personally, I'd think long and hard before…
Comment linking /2011/01/14/what-the-heck-is-shadow-dom/
on “Ask HN: What are the technical reasons HTML inputs are impervious to CSS?”Submitted Degrees of Open Source as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Vision-oriented and impact-oriented mindsets (2022) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Behavior over Time Graphing Tool as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Challenge of Coherence as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What the Heck Is Shadow DOM? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What the heck is Shadow DOM? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
