This is an excellent writeup, probably the best I've seen that summarizes the issues with webcomponents with the viewpoint of react. I'd like to add a few more reasons why I think webcomponents haven't had great adoption though:
1. Lack of convention. They tried to create lower level APIs rather than an opinionated structure of how to organize webcomponents, leading to the majority of consumption of them to be via a framework. They promised to remove the need for frameworks, not create more! I really wish webcomponents implemented more ease-of-use features and convention rather than relying on libraries to do this.
2. Lack of organization. This is similar to the above, but the majority of the time I see people bundling their html and css into js files in order to have a one-component-per-file approach. There's a part of me that kind of wishes we had html imports for subdirectories, and allowed you to load either button/ (and all subfiles) or even button.gz, which would have the html/css/js all bundled together in a sensible and opinionated way. The lack of opinions on how to organize your components, and the lack of html imports, have led to a chaotic mess where everything has to be interpreted before first paint.
I didnt think Ryans article came across as angry at all, and hes forgot more about web development than 99.9% of people will ever know. His lead with solid has been followed by practically every major framework, hes usually ahead of the curve and right.
A very enlightening history. As a non-frontend-dev, this is the context I've been missing - I finally get why Web Components have been such a confusing mess every time I've tried to learn them.
(as a bonus I very much appreciate the takedown of React's claims to "unidirectional flow" and "functional programming")
I was wondering if this ends up actually involving Barbara Liskov's ideas or it's just a pun or something and it does end up that these technologies have problems with Liskov Substitution, so that's nice.
While it is obviously full of interesting internet history and technical details and a bunch of good points about, well, software architecture in general, it was extremely hard to get through. It's way, way too long and makes me think that this person really loves the sound of his own voice.
The author is a perfect example of an enlightened centrist. The post starts out with a (way too long) self-righteous lecture about the tone of the internet, and then quickly devolves into just bashing react using some pretty dubious arguments. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Some of his claims about react are, at best, extremely misinformed and at worst, makes me truly want to doubt his ability to build software and abstractions -- which I don't really honestly believe, because many of his other technical discussions clearly show he knows what he is talking about, at least to some extent. Some of the claims:
- Impossible to understand what is going on in any given component: You can absolutely build components that make this hard and are tightly coupled to all sorts of state and what have you.. but you can also not. You can build tangled balls of mud anywhere, using anything.
- Claims that "large chunks of the react community have given up on unit testing".. by citing some random guy on twitter. Maybe I should create a xhitter account and make the opposite claim. Meanwhile, if you want some actual data, try looking at npmtrends for @testing-library/react.
- Blathers on about the virtual dom. Is it a perfect solution? No, no one has ever thought it was. But in practice, re-renders are rarely a real problem. It also doesn't "re-render everything every time", and when there are too many re-renders, there are ways to avoid them. If it's still not fast enough, by all means, just use something else. The part about it not "acskhually being functional" because it performs optimizations under the hood is also just straight up embarrassing. It's an abstraction. And it's never been really functional as much as has been inspired by functional programming. It's still a pretty useful approximation to think about react components.
The part about "react commodifying devs" is just patently absurd and boggles the mind. Management (with a capital M, like the Man) has always been trying to treat developers as replaceable units where one dev is the same as the next dev. React has absolutely no role in this whatsoever except for the fact that, in the context of the web, it became extremely popular extremely fast and thus appeared in more job postings than anything else, since nothing has grown within the realm of software development quite like web development has grown.
While he addresses some really interesting issues with implementing web components, he just keeps bashing react every chance he gets, and considering how much of this post is spent on that in particular makes me really feel like this post is a (not so thin) veneer on top of what was originally meant to be a rant against react, in the same vein as all the other rants he starts out his post by distancing himself from.
This is an excellent writeup, probably the best I've seen that summarizes the issues with webcomponents with the viewpoint of react. I'd like to add a few more reasons why I think webcomponents haven't had great adoption though:
1. Lack of convention. They tried to create lower level APIs rather than an opinionated structure of how to organize webcomponents, leading to the majority of consumption of them to be via a framework. They promised to remove the need for frameworks, not create more! I really wish webcomponents implemented more ease-of-use features and convention rather than relying on libraries to do this.
2. Lack of organization. This is similar to the above, but the majority of the time I see people bundling their html and css into js files in order to have a one-component-per-file approach. There's a part of me that kind of wishes we had html imports for subdirectories, and allowed you to load either button/ (and all subfiles) or even button.gz, which would have the html/css/js all bundled together in a sensible and opinionated way. The lack of opinions on how to organize your components, and the lack of html imports, have led to a chaotic mess where everything has to be interpreted before first paint.
I didnt think Ryans article came across as angry at all, and hes forgot more about web development than 99.9% of people will ever know. His lead with solid has been followed by practically every major framework, hes usually ahead of the curve and right.
A very enlightening history. As a non-frontend-dev, this is the context I've been missing - I finally get why Web Components have been such a confusing mess every time I've tried to learn them.
(as a bonus I very much appreciate the takedown of React's claims to "unidirectional flow" and "functional programming")
I was wondering if this ends up actually involving Barbara Liskov's ideas or it's just a pun or something and it does end up that these technologies have problems with Liskov Substitution, so that's nice.
This post is really something.
While it is obviously full of interesting internet history and technical details and a bunch of good points about, well, software architecture in general, it was extremely hard to get through. It's way, way too long and makes me think that this person really loves the sound of his own voice.
The author is a perfect example of an enlightened centrist. The post starts out with a (way too long) self-righteous lecture about the tone of the internet, and then quickly devolves into just bashing react using some pretty dubious arguments. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Some of his claims about react are, at best, extremely misinformed and at worst, makes me truly want to doubt his ability to build software and abstractions -- which I don't really honestly believe, because many of his other technical discussions clearly show he knows what he is talking about, at least to some extent. Some of the claims:
- Impossible to understand what is going on in any given component: You can absolutely build components that make this hard and are tightly coupled to all sorts of state and what have you.. but you can also not. You can build tangled balls of mud anywhere, using anything.
- Claims that "large chunks of the react community have given up on unit testing".. by citing some random guy on twitter. Maybe I should create a xhitter account and make the opposite claim. Meanwhile, if you want some actual data, try looking at npmtrends for @testing-library/react.
- Blathers on about the virtual dom. Is it a perfect solution? No, no one has ever thought it was. But in practice, re-renders are rarely a real problem. It also doesn't "re-render everything every time", and when there are too many re-renders, there are ways to avoid them. If it's still not fast enough, by all means, just use something else. The part about it not "acskhually being functional" because it performs optimizations under the hood is also just straight up embarrassing. It's an abstraction. And it's never been really functional as much as has been inspired by functional programming. It's still a pretty useful approximation to think about react components.
The part about "react commodifying devs" is just patently absurd and boggles the mind. Management (with a capital M, like the Man) has always been trying to treat developers as replaceable units where one dev is the same as the next dev. React has absolutely no role in this whatsoever except for the fact that, in the context of the web, it became extremely popular extremely fast and thus appeared in more job postings than anything else, since nothing has grown within the realm of software development quite like web development has grown.
While he addresses some really interesting issues with implementing web components, he just keeps bashing react every chance he gets, and considering how much of this post is spent on that in particular makes me really feel like this post is a (not so thin) veneer on top of what was originally meant to be a rant against react, in the same vein as all the other rants he starts out his post by distancing himself from.
Great insights and a truly informative read.
Shame it didn't get more traction, possibly because it was so long. Would have loved to see where the comments would have taken it.