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by wsatb 115 days ago
Web components are a trend? I've been using them for close to 10 years and they're still not anywhere close to mainstream. Loudly as possible? They've quietly just kind of been there for years.

I think we have a generation of developers that only know React and they're so engrained with it they simply cannot imagine a world without it. If you really can't find a use case for web components then you're living in a bubble.
2 comments
austin-cheney 115 days ago
We have been through all this before with jQuery. The generation of JavaScript developers at the beginning on React only knew jQuery and they really wanted to shoehorn all the jQuery nonsense into the standards. From their perspective it makes complete sense because that is the only one way to do things. They got querySelectors into the DOM.

Now we are seeing the exact same thing again. People only know React, so they want the standards to look like the only one thing they know. That doesn't make it a good idea. Every time this comes up we exchange simplicity and performance for easiness and temporary emotional comfort. Its only a temporary win until the next generational trend comes along.

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troupo 115 days ago
> If you really can't find a use case for web components then you're living in a bubble.

There's a very tiny use-case for web components. And even there it's riddled with a huge amount of potential (and actual) footguns that "in the bubble" devs have been talking about for a decade at this point, and some which were finally acknowledged: https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html (no updates since)

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wsatb 115 days ago
> There's a very tiny use-case for web components.

That's weird, we've been using them at my company for a number of years and there's plenty of other examples of them being adopted elsewhere too. This continues to read as, "it's not React, so it's bad."

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troupo 115 days ago
There are companies that still use jQuery, or Angular, or Ember, or vanilla JS, or Blazor, or...

Just because tech exists and is usable doesn't mean it doesn't have a list of issues and footguns a mile long, some of which are explicitly recognized by the Web Components Working Group. And which still need 20+ various specs to paper over.

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