[ravenstine]

Poor web components. Everybody rags on them.

[ng12]

Because the API is really ugly. I can't see them ever taking off except maybe as an implementation of another library with a cleaner API.

[ergo14]

You are correct, they are pretty low level. You want something like lit-element or stencil (or vue, svelte... etc) on top of them for a pleasant experience.

[interlocutor]

What are you talking about? There is hardly any API. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/... It is extremely simple.

[Crinus]

First time reading this.

On one hand it looks neat. This is something i expected browsers to be able to do since i noticed that Mozilla (pre-Firefox) implemented <blink> (or <marquee>?) in JavaScript.

On the other hand it looks like it'll become much harder for JavaScript-less environments to extract data from web-pages as now an article on a news site could be something like <news-article id="23848923"> and the JavaScript side will do the rest.

But being able to do something like <my-fancy-button caption="Go To Google" target="http://google.com/"> that in the background creates all the canvases and such needed will be neat.

[Asooka]

>On the other hand it looks like it'll become much harder for JavaScript-less environments to extract data from web-pages as now an article on a news site could be something like <news-article id="23848923"> and the JavaScript side will do the rest.

This is already the case on a lot of sites, just not standardized. With the standard you could sandbox the javascript or maybe implement specific parsing for the most common web components.

[madmulita]

Oh, wait for webassembly, that's gonna be fun.

[jlengrand]

Which is exactly the point :). So good news!

[cmpolis]

This is one of the goals of Polymer- a cleaner API/abstraction layer on top of web components, right?

[floatboth]

Well, forget about "Polymer the library", it served us well but it's very legacy at this point. The successor is https://lit-element.polymer-project.org and it's awesome.

[interlocutor]

Why on earth do you need something that heavy? How about this 200-line lib instead: https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder It lets you TSX format (same to React) to implement as well as to use web components.

[spankalee]

> Unlike React.js UIBuilder does not do incremental screen updates

LitElement + lit-html give you very efficient updates, and don't require non-standard JS like JSX.

[interlocutor]

lit-html is no more of a standard than JSX. In fact JSX is better because tools like VSCode is able to validate both HTML and embedded JavaScript.

[nothis]

So we finally got a goddamn proper standard and we're already cheering for the next API to throw in front of it to make it "cleaner"?

[floatboth]

Actually, no. There's no need or possibility to make it "cleaner", but there's always the direction of making it more "high level". These are very different things.

If you look at https://lit-element.polymer-project.org — it's just a base class that integrates declarative DOM templates.

The platform APIs are not opinionated about templating, they just provide proper mechanisms for declaring elements and having isolated DOM subtrees. It makes sense to leave templating to libraries, because… well, good luck on getting even just two people to agree about how templating should be done :)

[fourthark]

Yeah - I do not understand the snark on this thread. This is great news.

[sujNansnam]

It’s one of those things where you’re only going to notice it as a user when it’s broken.

[saagarjha]

There's nothing inherently wrong with web components. People rag on them when they aren't used correctly, and this is apparently hard to do.