Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
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Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
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Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#2I 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 event binding, which at that point you might as well go full on (React/Angular/Vue) + Webpack/Babel. The dream of being able to share reusable components breaks down the moment your designer wants an extra 5 pixels of padding here or there. It's fun to use them for small things but it's just not viable as an alternative to frameworks.
Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#3The shadow dom is just JavaScript, HTML and CSS. For any significantly sized component I would want a framework to wrangle all that.
Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#4It's not about implementation details, it's about programming paradigm. In the case of React, it's
- Declarative, functional API to write reuseable UI.
- REAL reusable business logic with React Hooks.
- REAL universal data fetching with React Suspense.
- REAL error boundary with Error Boundary.
- Learn once, write everywhere!
Do Web Components have the above benefits (yet) ?
Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#5So 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 the shadow dom polyfill works, it doesn’t)... it’s just, not the right way to do this sort of stuff.
Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#6I 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…
(sorry, I'm not well versed in some of these things)
Would it make sense for React to start using this native web-component at some level moving forward, to improve efficiency ? Maybe another library will replicate most of Reacts features but is powered by this native (faster/cleaner) technology?
Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#7CSS is still a pain in Web Components. Constructable stylesheets solve that problem, but they're still in the "Worth Prototyping" stage for Firefox.
Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#8I 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…
(sorry, I'm not well versed in some of these things) Would it make sense for React to start using this native web-component at some level moving forward, to improve efficiency ? Maybe another library will replicate most of Reacts features but is powered by this native (faster/cleaner) technology?
afaik web components are mostly about encapsulation and semantics; they let you box up arbitrary HTML, JS and CSS and put a little bow on top so that it looks like one “custom” HTML tag to the rest of the document. (I could be misremembering.)
React is mostly about life cycles, propagation, and composition. The first two are orthogonal to web components afaik. The third has some overlap, but it’s mostly complementary with web components (once again, afaik.)
Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#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 technologies they're backed by doesn't matter, but if you can't reimplement either of them using WebComponents it should probably tell you something about WebComponents:
- It's very opinionated about a lot of things.
- It disagrees with many of the (much more popular) frontend frameworks far too much.
React does a whole lot of things right, and it does them right in a relatively small package with a relatively small API surface, and you can extract the essence into even smaller libraries. With functional components, you can even build React components that have almost no React in them at all, other than JSX.
I don't think we need new complicated technologies to solve the kinds of problems React solves. If anything, we need less, like an alternative to the current DOM model.
Most of the innovations in the frontend world don't seem like they can be cleanly applied to Web Components, or even layered on top of it. And if we want to update it down the road to a new major version, we have to wait for every major browser vendor to have a stable implementation and iron out edge cases/differences. That's not a good bet at all based on how it went with Web Components the first time.
In other words, No Thanks, I'll take my framework.
Re: Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?
#10I 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…
(sorry, I'm not well versed in some of these things) Would it make sense for React to start using this native web-component at some level moving forward, to improve efficiency ? Maybe another library will replicate most of Reacts features but is powered by this native (faster/cleaner) technology?
Angular has kept web component compatibility as a high priority. You can publish angular components as web components, and even leverage native functionality like shadow Dom.