This is a quick one about a little trick I’ve recently used to ship simplemaps.com’s World Cities Database basic data through my latest geo2city npm package, and as SQLite database.
There are few things that made me ship 690K zip archive instead of 2.3MB database or, once zipped, 1.1MB, but while the current saving doesn’t look too relevant, the same technique made me create a 3MB zip database instead of 280MB file, using a different source of data (check version 0.2, if curious).
Create optimized tables
As obvious as it sounds, most distributed SQLite databases usually just ship a big table with all fields in it, either because these were imported right away from .csv …
After being revolutionary in 2007 to unleash CSS selectors that never existed, the specification moved from v1.0 to the current, recommended, v3.1, but browsers stopped with v1.0 … and we’re missing out!
XPath vs CSS
The fundamental difference between these two standards is that one was born to crawl and analyze the DOM tree in all “axes”, while the other one job is to live-style the DOM, without any way to crawl its content.
That’s it: XPath is a searching tool while CSS is a real-time “drawing” tool, hence rich in functionalities to style, but poor in terms of DOM tree analysis.
What XPath can do that CSS cannot
Here an example: even if the CSS :has(...) selector is part of the most recent specifications, no browser has implemented it to date, while in XPath…
Heavily inspired by the recent Vue 3 announcement, uce-template promises a very similar DX, also defeating most pain-points of the modern Web.
Some background
There are very few developers that fully understand the purpose and context of Web Components, and few others not super happy about the current state.
If we also consider the controversial history of the Web Components umbrella, where HTML Imports got removed, Custom Elements shipped in two different versions, and one browser vendor doesn’t want to fully comply with latest specs, plus the fact that partial Templates updates are still nowhere, we can easily sympathize with the confusion and skepticism that surrounds this part of the standard Web, but let’s start clarifying a few things before…
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