What to ask your agency about web components
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on web components, these questions are worth asking early.
Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Custom elements work without committing to a framework. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
Useful when several teams share one component set. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
The short version
The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Three things worth confirming about web components before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Useful when several teams share one component set — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.