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The overrides pattern they describe sounds like a nightmare to maintain. It's almost the exact opposite of how I'd design the API for a set of reusable componen
by lewisl9029 7y ago
The overrides pattern they describe sounds like a nightmare to maintain. It's almost the exact opposite of how I'd design the API for a set of reusable components: provide a minimal API surface to cover existing use cases, and evolve the API deliberately to cover new use cases as they arise.
Allowing users to override arbitrary styling parameters is a recipe for disaster in a reusable component, because once you start doing that, literally any change you make to the component could become a breaking change for some usage of it in the wild. There is no more explicit interface that users of the component are expected to work with that you can hide implementation details behind, as to afford you the ability to change those implementation details without breaking users, because users can just reach into your implementation details with those arbitrary parameters and change them at will, in a way that's potentially incompatible with how you might want to evolve the component in the future. As a side effect, any sense of brand/design consistency you might want to enforce through a design system goes out the window. Interestingly enough, this set of components use component-oriented CSS-in-JS, which is a pattern developed specifically to provide style isolation between components that wasn't possible (or at least not in a foolproof way) with regular CSS, yet they chose to open that can of worms back up through their API.
I've found that a much better middle ground is to deliberately accept React nodes or render props in your components so that you can explicitly yield control of rendering to users for specific, isolated pieces of the component, like the contents of a modal or the individual options of a dropdown. This gives users freedom to render what they need to render, but within the confines of a consistent design framework that enforces overarching rules around consistent use of spacing, colors, transitions, etc. And such an API can still be evolved deliberately to support new use cases without the risk of breaking users unintentionally.
- lewisl9029 7y agoNote that the above mostly applies to company/product specific component libraries where maintaining design/brand consistency is of great importance. For components meant for public consumption, I personally would only use libraries that yield _all_ rendering decisions to the user: not just styling, but the components being rendered as well as the way in which those components are composed. Usually that means providing state & handlers through a render prop API, so users can compose their own styled components in arbitrary arrangements that wouldn't be possible with an interface that only exposes specific component overrides inside of a rigid structure. See downshift as an example of a library that does this really well (https://github.com/downshift-js/downshift https://github.com/downshift-js/downshift), and contrast that to something like react-select that only offers the ability to provide overrides for specific components in its own predefined render tree (https://github.com/JedWatson/react-select https://github.com/JedWatson/react-select). Perhaps on top of that you can also provide a reasonable styled default, but not offering low level control of rendering is usually a deal breaker in my book when picking third party components to work with.
- AgentME 7y agoI think there's a big difference between Downshift and Base Web. Downshift is a low-level component offering powerful behaviors that you can use to build your own UI widgets, etc. Base Web looks more like a set of ready-to-use UI widgets. You use it because you specifically want a button that's styled and works the Uber Base Web way. Uber wants all of their buttons to look consistent, so obviously Base Web is going to have styling built into it. Maybe Base Web's button could be implemented using Downshift. If you don't want Base Web's button styling, then you're not Base Web's target audience. You're probably best off implementing your own button using Downshift too.
- miksuv 7y agoThat's just partly true. From the Base Web website: "Base Web is a set of reusable React components that implements the Base Web design language and can be used in two different ways: To build an application that fully adopts the Base Web design language, you import and use Base Web components out of the box. To build a new design system inherited from the Base, you take Base Web components and customize them through the Overrides mechanism. If you are building an application using the Base Web design language (the first scenario), you should avoid further customization. This helps to keep the design of your application consistent and makes future upgrades easier." Uber uses Base Web in both ways since there are some additional related design systems (historic reasons) and that's why a lot of effort was put into overrides.
- bernawil 7y agoFunny, I just wasted a good while trying to modify the suggestions dropdown for an input in the react-select.
- miksuv 7y agoI get this concern and I used to have a very similar feeling about it. Uber had an older React component library that was more locked down in a way you pretty much described. Number one complain was "not easy to customize" and that probably applies for every component library out there. You describe render props as a "middle ground". For us, it is the last resort / nuclear option (as described here https://baseweb.design/theming/understanding-overrides/#override-the-entire-subcomponent https://baseweb.design/theming/understanding-overrides/#over...). You give the consumer all the freedom to completely replace the guts of your component. Sure, nothing provides more flexibility but at the same time, consumer has to do a lot of heavy lifting - creating a whole new component. However, developers usually want to tweak some small things. Maybe changing some color or padding. Forcing them to swap the whole subcomponent through render prop is an overkill and once they "opt-out" that way, they will never get any updates from us since that part of component is completely replaced. Of course, ideally we want them to always use the defaults but that's not how real organizations with thousand of engineers and hundreds of apps work so we rather let them customize but on our terms. We don't want to see them hacking the styles through CSS selectors or "render prop" everything which equals not using our visual components at all. It's a compromise we had to make to make everyone reasonably happy. Surprisingly, it's not a nightmare to maintain. We don't consider changed styles as a breaking change and in last 6 months I haven't seen complains about that. Although, it makes the Base Web codebase more complex and all changes need to be thoughtful. But that's a cost that Base Web pays so other teams don't have to.
- btown 7y agoDo you use any sort of visual comparison tools or snapshotting in CI to catch regressions caused by changes to Base? Seems like this would remove any (technical) objections to having overrides.