What will the future of this project look like now that @material web components have been archived?

[gmassman]

Firstly, I want to say thanks for building this collection of component wrappers for Svelte! It's been very useful in my organization and is a very valuable piece of open source software.

That said, I am somewhat concerned about the future of this project considering material-components-web was archived a couple weeks ago. How is this going to affect svelte-material-ui? Were there are any foundational issues in the archived dependency that were never addressed? Will this project vendor those components to fix the problems? Or can maintenance and fixes all be handled at the Svelte component level?

[hperrin]

First, this project isn't going away any time soon. It is the UI library for my email service, https://port87.com. So at least in the foreseeable future, as long as Port87 is around, SMUI will be around and actively maintained.

Now, the question is which path forward I'm going to take. Personally, I've never liked Material 3 (Material You), but I may have to start migrating that way if I choose to migrate to an upstream library based on it, like Material Web. Considering how limited that library is though, unless something drastic changes, that probably won't be the case.

The upstream MDC-Web components honestly don't do a whole lot in SMUI. They handle some of the business logic, but I don't use any of their DOM manipulation code. Most of the styling comes from their Sass code though. So the easiest path forward that would be the least intrusive to existing projects using SMUI (including my own) would be to rewrite the business logic parts inside SMUI and copy over the styling. That would also improve a lot of the code that works around some of the issues with how Svelte and the MDC-Web foundations handle things. Once the styling is fully under SMUI, I can also fix a lot of the issues that were never addressed upstream.

So, basically, it's probably a good thing that Google decided to archive the upstream library, because it makes my decision to fork the styles and reimplement the business logic easier.

[gmassman]

Thanks for the quick response! Yes I know this project is under active maintenance and your approach sounds very reasonable. Glad to hear you have a plan in place to migrate the styles into SMUI.