Building a Server-Rendered Map Component
Maps are a standard tool in our web UI toolkit; they’re an easy way to link our applications to the real world they (hopefully) involve. At the same time though, maps aren’t as easy to include in your web site as you might want, and certainly don’t feel like a native part of the web.
Critically, unlike many other UI components, you normally can’t just serve up a map with plain HTML. You can easily serve up HTML with a videos embedded, or complex forms, or intricate SVG images and animations, or MathML, but maps don’t quite make the cut. (Google Maps does actually have an Embed API that’s closer to this, but it’s very limited in features, and it’s really just bumping the problem over their fence).
If you want to throw a map on page, you’re going to need pick out a library, write and serve up scripts to imperatively define and render your map, and bring in the extra complexity (and page weight and other limitations) of all the supporting code required to put that into action. That’s not really that much work, and we’ve got used to making fixes like these everywhere. It’s a far cry though from the declarative simplicity of:
<video src=“cats.mp4”></video>
Maps are one small example of the way that the HTML elements we have don’t match what we’re using day to day, and the workarounds you have to use to get closer.
How can we show a map on a page with the same simplicity and power?
Web Components
What we really want is to add<map lat=1.2 long=3.4 zoom=5> to our pages, get a great looking map, and be done with it. That’s the goal.
In principle, web components handle this nicely. You define a custom element for your map, give it its own rendering logic and internally isolated DOM, and then just start using it. That’s really great, it’s a fantastic model, and in principle it’s perfect. Clicking together isolated encapsulated UI elements like this is the key thing that every shiny client-side framework has in common, and getting that as a native feature of the web is incredible.
Support is terrible though. Right now, it’s new Chrome only, so you’re cutting out 50% of your users right off the bat, and it’s going to be a very long time until you can safely do this everywhere. You can get close with lots of polyfills, and that’s often a good choice, but there is extra weight and complexity there, and you really just want a damn <map> — not to spend hours researching the tradeoffs of Polymer or the best way to polyfill registerElement outside it.
Even once this works, you still have the extra front-end complexity that results, and the associated maintenance. You have to serve up your initial content, and then re-render in your JavaScript before some of it is visible. You quickly end up with content that is invisible to almost all automated scripts, scrapers, devices, and search spiders. Depending on JavaScript doesn’t just cut off the small percentage of users who turn it off.
Mobile devices make this even more important. With their slow connections and slow rendering, are going to have to wait longer to see your page when you render things client-side. JavaScript is not at all resilient to connection issues either — any device that drops any scripts required to for basic rendering won’t show any of that rendered content, while simple HTML pages continue with whatever’s available. New Relic’s mobile statistics show 0.9% of HTTP requests from mobile devices failing on the network. That failure rate builds up quickly, when applied to every resource in your page! With just that 0.9% of failures and only 10 resources to load, 9% of your users aren’t going to see your whole page.
Web components are a great step in the right direction, and are exactly the right shape of solution. Web components that progressively enhance already meaningful HTML content are even better, and can mitigate many of the issues above. In many cases like maps though, your component is rendering core page content. Web components do give you a superb way to do that client-side, but rendering your content client-side rendering comes with heavy costs. Worse, it’s frequently not a real necessity. A static map would give all the core functionality (and could then be enhanced with dynamic behaviour on top).
What if we could get these same benefits, without the costs?
Server Components
Server Components is an attempt to improve on our current approach to rendering the web, with the same approach and design as web components, but renderable on the server-side.
Without Server Components, if you wanted to quickly show a map of a location sprinkled with pins, or shaded areas, or whatever else, you couldn’t easily do so without serving up a mountain of JavaScript. Instead, I want to write <map lat=1.2 long=3.4 zoom=5> in my HTML and have my users instantly see a map, without extra client-side rendering or complexity or weight.
This sounds like a pipe dream, but with Server Components, we can do exactly that. We can define new HTML elements, write simple rendering code in normal vanilla JavaScript that builds and transforms the page DOM, and run all of that logic on the server to serve up the resulting ready-to-go JavaScript. All the client-side simplicity and power, without the costs.
Let’s stop there for now. In the next post, we’ll take a look at exactly how you’d implement this, and what you can do to start putting it into action yourself. Can’t wait? Check out https://github.com/pimterry/leaflet-map-server-component for the map component so far.
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