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Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

dannymoerkerke.com

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Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#111

Post by boubiyeah »

winterthedeep wrote: post #100

I worked with Polymer-based components ~2 years ago (an eternity in frontend-land), and I want to share my biggest pain point: you may want to integrate a ` `, but it does not "look right" in your design (eg white website, but the carousel has a black background). If the author did not set up CSS variables, you have to either try overriding stuff, or fork it. This problem is why every organization (eg GE with Predix…

No matter the underlying technology, "lightweight, truly reusable UI components" is almost an ideologic dream, at the web scale. (some companies might achieve it on their own scale with a lot of effort, but not sure for how many years)

As the maintainer, you don't want to cave in and add every possible configuration option people ask for so you have to decide what's a good, thin API for your component and it will never be enough for some usages. Styles are that much more subjective and even vary with design trends over the years!

It might be possible for very, very simple components like text inputs but then again, those are also the simplest to code directly in your framework, so you could wonder, why bother with an inferior programming paradigm in the first place?

The sweet spot for web components really seems tiny.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#112

Post by ernsheong »

Web Components did replace frameworks for me. I built KanRails (https://www.kanrails.com/) with LitElement, without React/Vue/etc.

The alpha is at https://app.kanrails.com/signup. Again, it's in alpha. It is essentially a Trello + Google Forms + Workflow wannable.

How? Stick to patterns, not libraries. Check out https://pwa-starter-kit.polymer-project.org/ for LitElement starter kits. And just use Webpack, rip out the Polymer CLI. Oh, I also use Redux.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#113

Post by boubiyeah »

wokwokwok wrote: post #5

So I tried web components two years ago, and it was very painful, and I crawled back to react. Why should I invest my time in it now? IE support? Are you kidding me? I really wanted web components to take off, but they didn’t. Without a new compelling narrative, I fail to see how they are “the future” in any meaningful sense. Releasing an early version of something that is bad and doesn’t work (and let’s not pretend…

No more reason now than 2 years ago.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#114

Post by winterthedeep »

benforreal wrote: post #106
winterthedeep wrote: post #100

I worked with Polymer-based components ~2 years ago (an eternity in frontend-land), and I want to share my biggest pain point: you may want to integrate a ` `, but it does not "look right" in your design (eg white website, but the carousel has a black background). If the author did not set up CSS variables, you have to either try overriding stuff, or fork it. This problem is why every organization (eg GE with Predix…

In the instance of Predix (I peripherally worked on that during my time at GE) and likely EA and every other large Web Component ecosystem you're thinking of, that's desired behavior. The real want is a design system such that things look consistent, but as design systems are CSS only, they aren't smart enough for interactions that require JS. So then the need for a design system becomes a need for components of some…

"styling a background" is just an example - I admit it is a bad one (glad I don't work in frontend anymore). I will read about CSS Modules and the other stuff you mentioned. Thank you.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#115

Post by ernsheong »

AaronFriel wrote: post #12

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.…

If you are starting a new project today, use LitElement. Only use Polymer 3 if you're coming from Polymer 2.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#116

Post by benforreal »

ernsheong wrote: post #112

Web Components did replace frameworks for me. I built KanRails ( https://www.kanrails.com/ ) with LitElement, without React/Vue/etc. The alpha is at https://app.kanrails.com/signup . Again, it's in alpha. It is essentially a Trello + Google Forms + Workflow wannable. How? Stick to patterns, not libraries. Check out https://pwa-starter-kit.polymer-project.org/ for LitElement starter kits. And just use Webpack, rip out…

"Stick to patterns, not libraries" - Such a simple statement, but concise as hell. It's whats been my mindset, but I haven't put it to words. Like normal DOM event bubbling is going to cover lots of use cases. When it doesn't, an event bus is crazy simple to write. A centralized data model can just be a static module. Need observables? Easy to write a simple one - otherwise there's likely a bazillion of them on npm. Not that I've used it, but it's not like Redux or MobX are restricted to React either

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#117

Post by z3t4 »

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…

Never use .innerHTML! Instead use .appendChild, .removeChild, and .innerText. Using .innerHTML is like having a program patch itself during runtime.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#118

Post by _bxg1 »

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 I don't get is why there isn't a native, declarative DOM templating API yet. It would be so much faster and would mostly eliminate the need for React and the like. Instead of a "virtual dom", a native "dom buffer".

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#119

Post by founderling »

I wonder why HTML never got includes.

It would be so nice to just write:
On Hacker News, for the first pageview, this would load the whole "Guidelines | FAQ | Support ..." section. On all other pageloads, the browser would already have it in the cache. So it does not have to be loaded again.

Building complex websites would become so much nicer. Because each part of a page would be an include.

Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

#120

Post by robrez »

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…

You might be interested in this: https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposals...
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