In comparison, Angular is a monster, and React is designed for the old browser capabilities, and is now staying around by inertia, not by inherent quality.
Its .html temples were shipped unmodified directly to the client. Except they weren't actually html, and sometimes the browser would try to clean them up, breaking the template.
Reactivity was achieved through all kinds of weird mechanisms (eg monkey-patching arrays to watch for mutations). It would frequently resort to polling on every tick or break completely.
DI used TypeScripts experimental decorators, even long after it was clear that it would never become stable.
On the other hand, templates weren't type checked.
Its .html temples were shipped unmodified directly to the client (yes, including comments). Except they weren't actually html, and sometimes the browser would try to clean them up, breaking the template.
Reactivity was achieved through all kinds of weird mechanisms (eg monkey-patching arrays to watch for mutations). It would frequently resort to polling on every tick or break completely.
DI used TypeScripts experimental decorators, even long after it was clear that it would never become stable.
On the other hand, templates weren't type checked.
Funny you should say that when the current advise for web components is to avoid Shadow DOM (almost like the plague)
> no web components
As in?
> no template strings
Why would React need template strings? React is not the only framework that doesn't use template strings for anything (Vue, Solid, Svelte come immediately to mind). And it's hard to accuse those of being behind the times when Solid is literally the reason for the upcoming native signals proposal
And yeah, probably they monkey-patched arrays and such, but that was just the way of the world before proxies and native signals. The cool part is Aurelia stuck to web standards, and those “weird mechanisms” were basically polyfills, so even old versions still run solid today, sometimes even faster by leveraging native features.
Yes, there are some people who say to build web components without shadow DOM, but I'm convinced they're only building leaf nodes so they don't need composition with slots. As soon as they try to build any kind of container element they hit big problems.
https://github.com/aurelia/binding/issues/108
> I never used Webpack
That has little to do with Aurelia, and Aurelia itself integrates with Webpack: https://github.com/aurelia/webpack-plugin
> The cool part is Aurelia stuck to web standards, and those “weird mechanisms” were basically polyfills
I could agree that Aurelia looks like you’re sticking to standards¹. If you don’t think about it, then everything kinda works 90% of the time.
But when you actually try to understand what goes on behind the scenes, like you can with React and Angular, there are just so many footguns, especially around composition and reactivity.
Even simple things like passing optional props² or detecting if a <slot> is occupied involved depressing amounts of reverse-engineering.
I’ve heard that Aurelia 2 supposedly fixes many of my issues, but I believe the core idea is beyond fixing. React, Solid and others have more powerful approaches that require fewer concepts to understand.
¹ Although there are still tons of custom concepts and syntax to learn.
https://dev.to/ryansolid/web-components-are-not-the-future-4...
https://dev.to/richharris/why-i-don-t-use-web-components-2ci...
https://daverupert.com/2023/07/why-not-webcomponents/
https://paularmstrong.dev/blog/2023/03/11/why-we-do-not-writ...
https://nolanlawson.com/2024/09/28/web-components-are-okay/
https://www.zachleat.com/web/good-bad-web-components/
https://mayank.co/blog/web-components-considered-harmful/
https://adamsilver.io/blog/the-problem-with-web-components/
https://web-highlights.com/blog/are-web-components-dead/
along with some criticisms from very knowledgeable people:
https://x.com/youyuxi/status/1839833110164504691 (author of Vue) https://x.com/Rich_Harris/status/1839785839036887361 (author of Svelte)
Web Components solve a few problems and introduce a few others, use them when they make sense for your needs.
No worries, web components themselves have a very nice critique in the form of their own community report https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html listing all the issues that many people had been taking about for literal years before this report.
--- start quote ---
It's worth noting that many of these pain points are directly related to Shadow DOM's encapsulation. While there are many benefits to some types of widely shared components to strong encapsulation, the friction of strong encapsulation has prevented most developers from adopting Shadow DOM, to the point of there being alternate proposals for style scoping that don't use Shadow DOM. We urge browser vendors to recognize these barriers and work to make Shadow DOM more usable by more developers.
--- end quote ---
And probably continued in HTML Web Components https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components/
A more technical and measured take on Shadow DOM is here: https://nolanlawson.com/2023/12/30/shadow-dom-and-the-proble...
> People coming from React-land can have a hard time reasoning about the difference between a custom element and a template render function and when best to use each
> This abuse of the component system can indeed lead to a massive explosion in nodes on a page and the performance tanks because of that
I know I certainly have that hard time deciding when I need a custom element and when a render function.
Unless you actually care about the web and its users. Then it turns out it's a very wise advice.
https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html
Web Components Community Group: 2022. You are one of the authors:
--- start quote ---
It's worth noting that many of these pain points are directly related to Shadow DOM's encapsulation. While there are many benefits to some types of widely shared components to strong encapsulation, the friction of strong encapsulation has prevented most developers from adopting Shadow DOM, to the point of there being alternate proposals for style scoping that don't use Shadow DOM.
...
Selection does not work across or within shadow roots. This makes fully-featured rich-text editors impossible to implement with web components. Some of the web's most popular editors have issues that are blocked on this functionality
...
Shadow boundaries prevent content on either side of the boundary from referencing each other via ID references. ID references being the basis of the majority of the accessibility patters outlines by aria attributes, this causes a major issue in developing accessible content with shadow DOM.
--- end quote ---
Those are just the tip of the iceberg as these are very explicitly stated in the doc.
Then there's the issues of shifting the responsibility to both developers and consumers to handle Shadow DOM correctly.
Styling/themeing is still pain despite several different specs like shadow parts.
Don't use styles in your components too much, use Javascript to inject CSS into document and shadow trees or else there will be performance impact https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html#constructab...
Don't use too many shadow roots or there will be performance impact https://front-end.social/@5t3ph/115135994774490769 (linked in the sibling comment by @azangru)
You can't participate in forms until you write more JS for it, and still your submit buttons will be broken with no solution in sight.
etc. etc.
You don't have to take my word for it. Here's Nolan Lawson, emphasis mine:
--- start quote ---
https://nolanlawson.com/2022/11/28/shadow-dom-and-accessibil...
Shadow DOM is a kind of retcon for the web. As I’ve written in the past, shadow DOM upends a lot of developer expectations and invalidates many tried-and-true techniques that worked fine in the pre-shadow DOM world.
--- end quote ---
That's not true. Web components that render nothing will contain only their children as nodes, that's good enough for a good amount of container use cases.
So you can have something like:
<uix-modal>
<uix-button icon="wifi"></uix-button>
<dialog>
<div class="flex flex-col gap-4 p-4 w-[640px]">
...
</div>
</dialog>
<uix-modal>
All there is to say was said years ago. Today it should be enough to know that, for example, "form associated custom elements cannot be a submit button" issue was opened 6 years ago, in 2019: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/814
In 2022 web component group report mentions it in passing: https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html#concerns-10
That issue is still open.
Or that web components breaking ARIA was known at least 2019: https://x.com/sarahmei/status/1198069119897047041 and this will not be fixed for another 4-5 years at least.
Imagine if any web framework had issues like that.
That doesn't even begin to cover things like "now every useful spec has to be acutely aware of Shadow DOM shenanigans" which delayed any number of specs like scoped CSS etc