shoelace/docs/getting-started/overview.md

6.0 KiB

Shoelace

A forward-thinking library of web components.

  • Works with all frameworks 🧩
  • Works with CDNs 🚛
  • Fully customizable with CSS 🎨
  • Open source 😸

Designed in New Hampshire by Cory LaViska.

Quick Start

Add the following code to your page.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/@shoelace-style/shoelace@%VERSION%/dist/shoelace/shoelace.css">
<script type="module" src="https://unpkg.com/@shoelace-style/shoelace@%VERSION%/dist/shoelace/shoelace.esm.js"></script>

Now you have access to all of Shoelace's components! Try adding a button:

<sl-button>Click me</sl-button>

See the installation instructions for more details and other ways to install Shoelace.

New to Web Components?

TL;DR – we finally have a way to create our own HTML elements and use them in any framework we want!

Thanks to the popularity of frameworks such as Angular, Vue, and React, component-driven development has become a part of our every day lives. Components help us encapsulate styles and behaviors into reusable building blocks. They make a lot of sense in terms of design, development, and testing.

Unfortunately, framework-specific components fail us in a number of ways:

  • You can only use them in the framework they're designed for 🔒
  • Their lifespan is limited to that of the framework's
  • New framework versions can lead to breaking changes, requiring substantial effort to update components 😭

Web components solve these problems. They're supported by all modern browsers, they're framework-agnostic, and they're part of the standard, so we know they'll be supported for many years to come.

This is the technology that Shoelace is built on.

What Problems Does This Solve?

Shoelace provides a collection of professionally designed, every day UI components built on a framework-agnostic technology. Why spend hundreds of hours or more building a design system from scratch? Why make a component library that only works with one framework?

With Shoelace, you can:

  • Start building things faster (no need to roll your own buttons)
  • Build multiple apps with different frameworks that all share the same UI
  • Skip having to learn a new component library every time you switch frameworks

If your organization is looking to build a design system, Shoelace will save you thousands of dollars.* All the foundational components you need are right here, ready to be customized for your brand. And since it's built on web standards, browsers will continue to support it for many years to come.

Whether you use Shoelace as a starting point for your organization's design system or for a fun personal project, there's no limit to what you can do with it.

*Please consider giving back some of what you save by supporting this project with a sponsorship.

Browser Support

Shoelace is tested in the latest two versions of the following browsers.

Chrome Edge Firefox Opera Safari

Critical bug fixes in earlier versions will be addressed based on their severity and impact.

If you need to support IE11 or pre-Chromium Edge, this library isn't for you. Although web components can (to some degree) be polyfilled for legacy browsers, supporting them is outside the scope of this project. If you're using Shoelace in such a browser, you're gonna have a bad time. ⛷

License

Shoelace is designed in New Hampshire by Cory LaViska. It's available under the terms of the MIT license.

Designing, developing, and supporting this library requires a lot of time, effort, and skill. I'd like to keep it open source so everyone can use it, but that doesn't provide me with any income.

Therefore, if you're using my software to make a profit, I respectfully ask that you help fund its development by becoming a sponsor. There are multiple tiers to choose from with benefits at every level, including prioritized support, bug fixes, feature requests, and advertising.

👇 Your support is very much appreciated! 👇

Become a sponsor Star Follow

Attribution

Special thanks to the following projects and individuals that helped make Shoelace possible.

  • Components are compiled by Stencil
  • Documentation is powered by Docsify
  • Theme colors and form controls are inspired by Element
  • Icons are courtesy of Bootstrap Icons
  • Positioning of menus, tooltips, et al is handled by Popper.js
  • CDN services are provided by unpkg
  • The Shoelace logo was designed with a single shoelace by Adam K Olson