Design systems built on vanilla HTML and CSS can adhere closer to the “atomic” portion of Atomic Design, but when you move to a design system built on components—whether web components or JavaScript frameworks components like React—the smallest pieces of a design system become more complex. That evolution is inevitable, and the payoffs are significant, but the move to components means new challenges for the teams that maintain design systems. Now teams are defining their own HTML elements and associated attributes.
How an HTML element should work used to be a question left to the web's standard-setting bodies. Now it's a cross-disciplinary discussion about what components should or should not do, and how to support that behavior. For better or worse, we're all in the standards business now. In this session, Jason will teach you the questions you need to ask, how to plan for future use, and how your project schedules may change when you move from css-based to component-based design systems.