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Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

dannymoerkerke.com

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Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#11

Post by ssorallen »

Web Components don’t offer a declarative way of updating the DOM; it’s still `innerHTML` and using DOM APIs to edit the state of the live DOM. Backbone was a hassle to manage in any sizeable app because updating the view was left up to every dev to figure out themselves. React brought a declarative wrapper around the statefulness of the DOM, and that is the killer feature that Web Components does not offer at all. Vue adopted the declarative template approach as well.

The Web Components spec was written before React and Vue were very mature, and it unfortunately shows. Web Components might offer a better primitive for higher level frameworks to build on, but I would not suggest to anyone to use barebones Web Components over React or Vue.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#12

Post by AaronFriel »

The tooling is woefully inadequate, and the premiere Web Component tool is stringly typed to all heck which makes it a non-starter for me. I don't want giant blobs of runtime parsed text with no validation, syntax highlighting, and obviously no type checking.

But yet, here's Polymer 3:

    static get template() {
      return html`
        
          .response { margin-top: 10px; } 
        
        I like web components.

        Web components like you, too.
      `;
    }
Cool. What an enormous regression over TypeScript with React and Vue. My editor just sees components as enormous blobs of text, and what do you know, so does my build system.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#13

Post by davidjnelson »

jchw wrote: post #9

>Web Components will replace your frontend framework Yeah, I very much doubt that. Web Components is basically a suite of browser technologies. It's actually particularly heavy and I kind of hope it doesn't catch on personally, since it pushes so much to already giant monolithic web browsers. Frameworks and libraries like React and Angular are tools for developing applications first and foremost. The actual technolog…

Curious what you think about React Canvas https://github.com/Flipboard/react-canvas

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#15

Post by anthonyshort »

I don’t understand the push to make userland component abstractions into native primitives. It’s perfectly fine for the browser to just implement low level primitives for frameworks like React to build on top of. It allows the framework to develop much faster.

Web components kind of miss a lot of the reasons why React has taken off. Encapsulation is one thing but it’s the declarative way of handling state, effects, and the DOM that make it powerful. Web components would need a framework on top of it to make it usable by developers building anything significant.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#16

Post by revvx »

I strongly believe Web Components will catch on, but not in its vanilla form. Writing code for them is a pain in the ass for non-trivial stuff.

They're too low level compared to modern frameworks.

IMO the future of the web will be about compiling React, Vue, Svelte, to Web Components, for interoperability reasons. And nope, Polymer isn't as good as any of those.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#17

Post by yesimahuman »

aphextron wrote: post #2

I love writing Web Components, but they're never going to really be a thing. The promise was that we could create native components without any dependencies at all but it just hasn't worked out that way. Shadow DOM support, the real killer feature, is patchy at best without polyfills. Orchestrating them into any kind of complex app still requires some kind of framework to handle things like passing down props and eve…

Strongly disagree. We (Ionic) built our new version directly on top of Web Components and they are certainly a thing for us and our users building real apps on top. Plus, they are a huge reason why we now support React and Vue and plain JS.

Frankly, this has been transformational for our project and for our business. I'm completely sold.

One problem with the WC debate is people constantly compare the raw Web Component collection of APIs to a framework, when in reality, you'll add in libraries or extras on top of your Web Components to get similar functionality (like Stencil: http://stenciljs.com/), but you'll likely not build apps with them as much as you'll build components to share with others.

In that sense, the killer app for Web Components is actually Design Systems, not SPAs.

I disagree with the idea that Web Components replace your framework, however. They solve different problems! For Ionic as a cross-platform Design System, they are a major asset.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#18

Post by wwright »

jchw wrote: post #9

>Web Components will replace your frontend framework Yeah, I very much doubt that. Web Components is basically a suite of browser technologies. It's actually particularly heavy and I kind of hope it doesn't catch on personally, since it pushes so much to already giant monolithic web browsers. Frameworks and libraries like React and Angular are tools for developing applications first and foremost. The actual technolog…

I think most of the rationale is around sharing components easily, at a level separate from NPM/&c. For things like JIRA/Disqus widgets, or for small components shared across otherwise disparate parts of a large site (things like Office 365).

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#19

Post by yesimahuman »

anthonyshort wrote: post #15

I don’t understand the push to make userland component abstractions into native primitives. It’s perfectly fine for the browser to just implement low level primitives for frameworks like React to build on top of. It allows the framework to develop much faster. Web components kind of miss a lot of the reasons why React has taken off. Encapsulation is one thing but it’s the declarative way of handling state, effects, a…

They aren't trying to solve the same problems. The main problem they solve, that no other userland framework solves, is that I can now share a collection of my rich JavaScript components with every single web developer in the world regardless of the technology they build web apps with.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#20

Post by dosy »

ssorallen wrote: post #11

Web Components don’t offer a declarative way of updating the DOM; it’s still `innerHTML` and using DOM APIs to edit the state of the live DOM. Backbone was a hassle to manage in any sizeable app because updating the view was left up to every dev to figure out themselves. React brought a declarative wrapper around the statefulness of the DOM, and that is the killer feature that Web Components does not offer at all. Vu…

what about slots?
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