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by publicdebates 166 days ago
As far as I can tell, the whole web components umbrella came into being because React/Vue got really popular, and the spec/browser people said hey let's bring the core common denominator of those into native HTML/JS, as if it would bring us closer to having native Vue/React. Which of course never happened, partly because HTML is fundamentally incapable of having anything but string attribute values, and partly because reactive DOM is basically a hard problem that can't or maybe shouldn't be solved natively.
1 comments
troupo 166 days ago
> As far as I can tell, the whole web components umbrella came into being because React/Vue got really popular, and the spec/browser people said hey let's bring the core common denominator

First web components proposal is from 2011. First specs are from 2011-2013.

React was introduced in 2013 and didn't gain much traction until at least a year later.

Vuejs was publicly announced in 2014.

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publicdebates 166 days ago
Right, and that proposal was withdrawn, and a new one, the one we have now, was proposed based on lessons learned from (or inspired by?) React/Vue. Maybe there was a common ancestor or general consensus about the techniques floating around in the community before proposal #1, but it was clearly inferior and flawed, and #2 was the one I'm talking about.
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troupo 166 days ago
> That proposal was withdrawn

"That proposal" was a talk by Alex Russel in 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20121119184816/https://fronteers...

Web Components are not a single proposal. Their core originally is three specs:

- Custom Elements

- Shadow DOM

- HTML Templates

Custom Elements v0 was implemented by Google, but the API changed (especially with ES6 classes making their way into all major browsers), and now everyone's on Custom Elements v1. There are very little fundamental changes between the two beyond that.

Shadow DOM is there, is an endless source of bizarre problems that literally no one has, and in the end will need ~30 different specs and changes to the browser to fix those problems (for a sample see https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html)

HTML Templates were only implemented in Firefox, and were removed in favor of JavaScript-only HTML Modules which were eventually scrapped in favor of on-off additions to JavaScript imports (see e.g. "CSS Module scripts" https://web.dev/articles/css-module-scripts)

> was proposed based on lessons learned from (or inspired by?) React/Vue.

Lol. The world wishes it were so. There rarely was such an insular group of people developing major web standards as those developing web components. They were hostile to any outside input or influence and listened to no voices, and looked at no implementations but their own.

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