Lit maintainer here. I should be going to bed, but I'll answer any questions if people have any!
Not sure why Lit showed up on the front page tonight :)
replies(11):
Not sure why Lit showed up on the front page tonight :)
Web components are nice because they're browser-native, but they don't support reactivity, which in hindisight, is a massive oversight, issue, whatever you want to call it - it's hindered adoption.
Lit is nice because there's a very straightforward progression from web components.
There is a proposal in TC39 for native signals, which I think would make a huge dent towards library-less reactivity.
I'm also working on a proposal for native reactive templating which would more-or-less obsolete lit-html. I wrote about the idea some on my blog:
- The time is right for a DOM templating API https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/26/the-time-is-right-for-a...
- What should a native DOM templating API look like? https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/30/what-should-a-dom-templ...
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I think we're stuck today in a little bit of a rut of extensibility. We wind up leaning on JavaScript to get things, because it is the Turning complete language in our environment. It is the only thing that can give us an answer when CSS and HTML fail us. So we wind up piling ourselves into the JavaScript boat. We keep piling into the JavaScript boat.
Bruce yesterday brought up the great example of an empty body tag, and sort of this pathological case of piling yourself into the JavaScript boat, where you wind up then having to go recreate all of the stuff that the browser was going to do more or less for you if you'd sent markup down the wire in order to get back to the same value that was going to be provided to you if you'd done it in markup. But you did it for a good reason. Gmail has an empty body tag, not because it's stupid. Gmail does that because that's how you can actually deliver the functionality of Gmail in a way that's both meaningful and reliable and maintainable. You wind up putting all of your bets, all of your eggs, into the JavaScript basket.
....
They're the sorts of things that you use when the semantic that you're trying to express is so far away from what HTML natively has a semantic for, that you're willing to go and be completely self served for it. Taking on for yourself accessibility, UI, UX, internationalization, localization, performance, theme ability; all of this stuff is mostly taken care of for you by HTML.
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14 years later, web components depend on JS to:
- participate in forms
- solve accessibility issues (not yet, but coming through a yet another JS-only standard)
- SSR is still mostly tied to JS and specific JS frameworks (and Declarative Shadow DOM doesn't really solve the issue because it requires you to duplicate a lot of code). See also https://ionic.io/blog/the-quest-for-ssr-with-web-components-...
- CSS modules and other imports that are moved entirely into JS
etc. etc.
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Slight off topic. From the same talk:
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Now, we can do some of that today. We can go and look at the top million pages and figure out which JavaScript library that they're using, which features are being most heavily used, we can put those things in DOM. But is that the right place for them? It's a hard thing to figure out.
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I wish they spent time figuring that out. We wouldn't have to wait a few decades for https://open-ui.org to slowly make its way into the browsers.