Where’s the Designer? #AskPolymer -- Polycasts #31

hey there poters Rob here welcome back to ask polymer the show where you send in your hashtag questions and we answer them our first question today comes from Frank who asks will the designer tool be back in polymer 1.0 that's a great question a lot of people have asked me about it you might remember the designer from some of our older talks uh it was originally built as kind of a proof of concept of what you could possibly do with web components and the original designer was never really a production ready thing I'm happy to say though that in 1.0 we are working on Designer 2 if you will uh but when I've asked the team for the the ETA all they said was it'll be a long time so we're working on it we're going to make it an actual production ready thing but it might take a while for it to come out so thank you Frank for sending in that question all right our next question comes from Dominic who asks can you talk a little bit about the Safari support for polymer so that's a really great question uh what's recently happened is the webkit folks have announced that they've just landed support for shadow Dom in webkit nightly so you can check out this blog post over here to read more about that uh what that means is polymer should in the very near future start running a lot faster in Safari when that finally ships in their stable version so uh hopefully things are going to be improving there really soon thanks for that really awesome question Dominic all right our next question comes from robz who asks can I create a dat data binding imperatively so that's a really interesting question it's one that a few people have sent me on Twitter I asked the team about this and they said that even though this is kind of a often requested feature it's not something that's currently supported in polymer and when I asked why they said mainly because they want to focus on polishing the core features before adding any sort of like additional fanciness like that so for the moment that's not supported not saying it won't be supported someday uh but at the moment no you have to do everything declaratively all all right our next question comes from Dany who asks should an element import all of its dependencies or can you just take those Imports and put it in an elements HTML file so that's a really cool question and you know a lot of people are confused about this because you can put stuff in an elements HTML file and it'll seem like the app continues to work but generally as a best practice we recommend that any element have all of its dependencies imported at the top of its definition and mainly because this ensures that those other elements have loaded before your element tries to register and and use them um people also wonder you know does that possibly impact performance but the way HTML Imports are written all of those additional Imports even if there are duplicates they will actually be duplicated so there's no performance penalty there and if you're using vulcanize it's only going to add those Imports once and it'll do it in the right order so the best practice is always have your elements import their dependencies and you should be good to go okay our last question comes from Jose who asks can you declare Styles in an iron media query and if not like what's the point of the iron media query element so that's a really good question I know when you first see that element it's a little confusing you're not quite sure how to use it but the idea with iron media query is that it's mainly meant for data bindings so if you need to change an attribute or a property on some other element when your page is at a smaller screen size you can do that using that element you know this is the kind of work that you actually can't do with CSS you would probably have to write custom JavaScript to do that the iron media query element is just going to let you do that in a nice declarative fashion so thank you Jose for sending in that really great question so that's it for today thank you everyone who sent in those excellent questions if you yourself have a question you can leave it down in the comments or you can ping us on a social network of you're choosing at # askpolymer as always thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time our next question comes from Jose who asks can I declare Styles this totally impressive ISM on the D FL [Music]