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'm a strong proponent of separation of duties on the web (style and visuals in CSS, layout in HTML, anything interactive in JS). Enabling data binding in HTML would only serve to blur those lines.

With some minimal JS, you can update each web component already. Is writing nameField.innerText = response.name really that difficult? What problem does it solve to make a standard for it? As for (de)serialization, JS has built-in support for JSON and XML. HTML attributes are everything but rickety in my opinion, as any decent parser will allow you to access them as if they are a normal dictionary. Put JSON in them if you really want to encode complex data in attributes, although you probably shouldn't.

I strongly believe the abhorrent overuse of React and other such libraries on the web is the sole reason our computers have gotten hundreds of times faster but the web is only slightly as quick. I don't see a place in web standards for a React-style functional design because of the specific rules each of these libraries have.

Web Components are a total mess and impossible to build anything of significance with. I can't even imagine how anyone would get anything done with them. It's like an Angular developer, an artist, and a mid-2010s neural net walked into a bar and sketched out a spec by taking shots and passing it clockwise.

Separation of languages is a silly way to separate things. You're building components: logic, structure and style are coupled. SwiftUI adopts the React model, and it succeeds because of it. One can build an app in React/SwiftUI in about 1/2 the time spent "separating concerns", and build systems still extract things out to be clean and performant, there's no sacrifice being made there. CSS is a shitshow and a total mess especially on large teams.

React has nothing to do with how performant an app is and if anything speeds them up compared to anything previously, you may be confusing the power and ease with which it enables development as getting some drunk on building larger apps, but that's only because of how effective it is. Twitter is a good example, great performance. It's way more about the team than the tool, though certainly it will get easier over time to have the defaults be better at optimization for smaller teams who are ambitious.

Most of the super bloated websites I see are basically news sites and other less-techy sites that are stuffed with ad tracking and have no tree shaking. The majority of React apps build with Webpack which supports tree shaking and lazy loading out of the box, plus React makes it possible to pre-render your entire app and deliver it as HTML that hydrates.

Weird, because we're using web components at my workplace to build complex web applications. We use Lit-Element as a base class and have come up with a top-down functional state pattern for data that removes the need for two-way binding. If a sub-component needs to update its state due to DOM interaction, it just fires off an event with info about that DOM interaction, and the data store for that component (another web component) does the necessary state modification, then fires off a "state-changed" event that tells all associated components to update their state from the "master" store (one line of code). All of the data elements use pure functions to do state modification, so doing complex operations is simply a matter of composing the appropriate functions. I've not used react myself other than playing with a few demos, but another developer on my team says the pattern is very similar to how react stores work, and the core modules that drive it are like 100 lines of code.