Emerging web standards

There are a couple of problems that make developing micro frontends that run on the client problematic. Among other considerations, we need to be able to isolate code as much as possible to avoid conflicts. However, in contrast to backend microservices, we may also want to share resources such as a runtime framework; otherwise, exhausting the available resources on a user’s computer is possible.

While this sounds exotic at first, performance is one of the bigger challenges for micro frontends. On the backend, we can give every service a suitable amount of hardware. On the frontend, we need to live with the browser running code on a machine that the user chooses. This could be a larger desktop machine, but it could also be a Raspberry Pi or a smartphone.

One area where recent web standards help quite a bit is with style isolation. Without style isolation, the Document Object Model (DOM) would treat every style as global, resulting in accidental style...