Using web components to encapsulate CSS and resolve design system conflicts

In March 2021, GitLab's Digital Experience team launched a new design for the GitLab blog, affecting over 1,300 posts and marking the largest project for their design system, Slippers. The transition faced challenges, particularly in integrating Tailwind CSS's Preflight styles with existing CSS, which led to conflicts with legacy components. To address this, the team employed web components, utilizing the shadow DOM for CSS encapsulation to isolate old and new styles, ensuring they didn't interfere with each other. This approach allowed them to maintain critical content accessibility even if JavaScript failed to load. While this added complexity to the build process and introduced client-side rendering to a static site, the near-perfect CSS encapsulation achieved justified these trade-offs. The team views web components as a promising future and is committed to using them responsibly.

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