The Failed Promise of Web Components

This post is needlessly snarky, but I don't disagree with the basic premise.

Here's what killed web components: lack of native databinding on the web. That's the reason the standard is useless without JS. Any modular, dynamic, modern UI requires databinding, which means it's going to bring in a framework anyway, which means that self-contained widgets are all going to bring in their own frameworks, which means that instead of one large framework on the page you have five or six, all of them stitched together through rickety HTML-attribute APIs and custom value-parsing strategies because HTML attributes are just strings.

I fail to grasp why databinding hasn't made it into a web standard yet. The web has a long tradition of feeling out features in the JS world before adopting the successful ones into the platform. jQuery turned into querySelector() and fetch(), CommonJS modules blazed the trail that led to ES modules, etc. And this next paradigm is more than ready to get standardized. Not only would it make the dream of web components possible, it would eliminate the need for a whole lot of the JavaScript out there and even make UIs faster, since reactivity logic would be implemented natively.

It's such an obvious, ubiquitous improvement to the web that I can only assume there's some fundamental implementation roadblock I'm missing.

> I can only assume there's some fundamental implementation roadblock I'm missing.

Current low level DOM API has something that fancy reactive data binding techniques will never have: ability to efficiently be used for an extremely wide range of data binding techniques and philosophies.

You go ahead and require implement something like virtual DOM as a standard, then what is everyone who doesn't want virtual DOM, or even this particular flavor of virtual DOM supposed to do? Virtual DOM designs are high level and not extensible. That is not something we need to be forced onto us for decades to come.

That might be hard to understand if you like React and its virtual DOM, and assume something like that will be made the standard, and will remain in fashion forever. How about: Angular v1 bindings are now the standard built into the DOM. How do you feel about that? That's how standardized virtual DOM will feel like in 10-20 years even to those who like it today. No matter what kind of data binding design you choose, React, Angular, some variation of observables or what, it will suck for a lot of people, and increasingly so as time goes by and fashions change.

Data binding is a solved problem on the frontend. It's just solved by libraries in many different ways depending on the developer's preferences. There is nothing wrong with that. The long term cost to centralizing all this diversity into a single opinionated high level API blessed by W3C is completely unacceptable. The low level API is working just fine today.