David Mulder's temporary corner on the intertubes...

UI-less custom elements? So, when you start using Polymer you will at some point encounter <iron-ajax> and if you’re like me you will be somewhat confused by the fact that it’s an element. After all, it has no UI and and seems to be entirely misplaced in the DOM. Now, after that you can do one of two things: Either accept it as ‘the way it works in Polymer land’ or you can just ignore it and not use elements like that. I - somewhat uncomfortably - did the former 1 and continued making a lot of elements like that. I made complex <auth-api> elements that would consume my API and toolbox elements like <text-utils> that provided a set of functions to work with text. And all seemed good in the land of Polymer. Till on a fateful day I was implementing a complex web worker and I realized I couldn’t use any of those libraries as web workers (and service workers) do not implement the DOM. Which sucked big time as I need functions on my <text-utils> element. Now,

Just a quick pointer I often notice people don’t know about on the Polymer slack group (or know about it but don’t understand it): It’s possible to share information between all elements of a certain type. This can be both great for performance (retrieving information only once instead of once for every element) and usability (once any <auth-api> element in my application finishes authentication all the other elements on the page can use the same token). Note: This post is going to be a bit more verbose and NOT to the point, just to cover some extra ground which might seem irrelevant to most of you O:) . What are HTML imports Let’s start with HTML imports, Eric Bidelman introduces them in one of his blogposts as the magic solution that’s supposed to make embedding HTML easy. The reason I am bringing them up is that understanding what they are and aren’t for and what they exactly do will make everything a whole lot easier to comprehend (and I just want to acknowledge it’