iPuzzler: Building a Pure JavaScript Web Component

From time to time, I create cryptic crossword puzzles, just for fun. I wanted a way to publish interactive puzzles on the web, and although there’s an open data format, iPuz, for crossword puzzles, when I looked around last year, I couldn’t find an easy way to publish iPuz puzzles on the web - so I created one.

iPuzzler is a pure JS web component that renders iPuz puzzles in a browser. In this talk I’ll explain how I built it - from working with JS modules and the shadow DOM, to simulating events, unit testing, inlining CSS, and why I chose to create it using pure JavaScript instead of using a framework. You might even learn a thing or two about cryptic crosswords along the way.