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I had the same reaction because it's ridiculous to claim that Web Components can stop the Framework Churn when they predate most of the frameworks and didn't st

I had the same reaction because it's ridiculous to claim that Web Components can stop the Framework Churn when they predate most of the frameworks and didn't stop the churn from happening. There are fundamental shifts happening in UI development, but Web Components are definitely not it.

lomnakkus 9y ago
> it's ridiculous to claim that Web Components can stop the Framework Churn when they predate most of the frameworks How on Earth do you figure that? I'm well aware that e.g. the <video/> element is basically implemented as a Web Component in most (all?) browsers, but the reason people are excited is that it's now possible for non-browser developers to use Web Components and have those components work just like native elements.
- masiulis 9y ago
  > How on Earth do you figure that? We were discussing Web Components at the time the Angular was getting popular and before React was even released. > for non-browser developers to ... have those components work just like native elements Honest question, how do Web Components help native developers in any way? Because from UI devs perspective, Web Components are useful only in a single edge case - when you must make sure than it's impossible for Cascading Style Sheets to cascade to your component. For a developer, Web components are solving problems that almost no one has or that were solved better by React and Vue.
  - lomnakkus 9y ago
    Do you not count e.g. jQuery as a framework? Angular and React are also pretty late entrants. Before that there was Backbone, Ember, etc. > Honest question, how do Web Components help native developers in any way? Being standardized, i.e. any old framework that can work with the DOM can with them, i.e. it reduces the number of truly necessary components to an "N" problem instead of an "NxM" component. Simple as that. (Let's say we're looking for a "scrolling/sortable table" component. N is the number of different components along the 'features' axis. M would be the number of frameworks (Vue, React, etc.). It's a massive waste of resources that M > 1.) EDIT: Yes, frameworks will still be around and that's fine.
    - masiulis 9y ago
      > Do you not count e.g. jQuery as a framework? Not really, it was used as a library to make JS work consistently across browsers and add missing features like querySelector and ajax fetch. But it had no opinion on how you should structure your app. Angular, Backbone and Ember is from the same post-jQuery era when talks about Web components started. > Being standardized, i.e. any old framework that can work with the DOM can with them But does a developer really care that it's possible to use the same component in different frameworks, when you need it to work with just one (yours)? I think the biggest fallacy is that people expect a technology to appear where you could just drop the component and it would work perfectly. From my experience, that will never happen - external component libraries are 90% what you need and 10% of hacking around missing features. The easier it is to safely and predictable hack the last 10% the better the framework/component library is. Web Components provide nothing that help in UI development: Helps manage multiple components state? Nope. Provide a declarative API for components? Nope, imperative - the one we are trying to get away from. Prevent CSS from affecting components? Cool, or I could just not write global styles, use BEM or CSS modules. Easy to share components? NPM still works just fine for that. > It's a massive waste of resources that M > 1 Agreed, that's something I thought a lot about. So I have created a cross-framework visual component editor - one component exports to many frameworks: https://github.com/UgnisSoftware/ugnis https://github.com/UgnisSoftware/ugnis
      - lomnakkus 9y ago
        > Angular, Backbone and Ember is from the same post-jQuery era when talks about Web components started. Really? Maybe I was just out of the loop. I hope we can agree that Web Components were little more than a gleam in somebody's eye at that point, right? (I'd love if you could point to any relevant mailing list/google groups discussions or whatever around this time, because apparently I missed 'em.) > But does a developer really care that it's possible to use the same component in different frameworks, when you need it to work with just one (yours)? Yes! I often have to work with multiple frameworks. Also: It'd be fanstastic if I had a choice matrix of "N" vs. "MxN" when I had to choose an implementation of, say, a scrollable-live-loading-table. That would be amazing, especially since we'd already decided on the "M" axis and written 20k LoC! I could choose the very best feature set for me! Ok, I might have to write a thin "shim" to have it interact with React or Vue.js or whatever, but the point is that this would be a trivial shim. I wouldn't have to rewrite the whole frontend when $BOSS decides that they want SuperLongUberTable. The mere fact that the contents of such a table are just DOM nodes would also mean that I would be able to publish (as OSS) our own implementation of said beast... to much acclaim and prestige. I also appreciate the fact that changing "NxM" to "N" means that (eventually) we'll get higher-quality components. For example, the components shipped in your browser are actually quite good. How many "good" video players did you see before HTML5 <video/>? My point is: The fact that anyone can write them means that there'll be a sort of evolutionary competition which tends towards an (admittedly, local) maximum -- but it's not as if the framework world has done much better, so... (Of course this is still at least a little hypothetical. We'll see, but I'm cautiously optimistic.) EDIT: I might not have articulated it, but I think it goes without saying that I obviously want all components to evolve towards the "stateless-and-emits-events-to-container-components" model of e.g. React... and I think that will happen because it's simply easier to integrate into any framework.

lomnakkus 9y ago

> it's ridiculous to claim that Web Components can stop the Framework Churn when they predate most of the frameworks How on Earth do you figure that? I'm well aware that e.g. the <video/> element is basically implemented as a Web Component in most (all?) browsers, but the reason people are excited is that it's now possible for non-browser developers to use Web Components and have those components work just like native elements.

masiulis 9y ago
> How on Earth do you figure that? We were discussing Web Components at the time the Angular was getting popular and before React was even released. > for non-browser developers to ... have those components work just like native elements Honest question, how do Web Components help native developers in any way? Because from UI devs perspective, Web Components are useful only in a single edge case - when you must make sure than it's impossible for Cascading Style Sheets to cascade to your component. For a developer, Web components are solving problems that almost no one has or that were solved better by React and Vue.
- lomnakkus 9y ago
  Do you not count e.g. jQuery as a framework? Angular and React are also pretty late entrants. Before that there was Backbone, Ember, etc. > Honest question, how do Web Components help native developers in any way? Being standardized, i.e. any old framework that can work with the DOM can with them, i.e. it reduces the number of truly necessary components to an "N" problem instead of an "NxM" component. Simple as that. (Let's say we're looking for a "scrolling/sortable table" component. N is the number of different components along the 'features' axis. M would be the number of frameworks (Vue, React, etc.). It's a massive waste of resources that M > 1.) EDIT: Yes, frameworks will still be around and that's fine.
  - masiulis 9y ago
    > Do you not count e.g. jQuery as a framework? Not really, it was used as a library to make JS work consistently across browsers and add missing features like querySelector and ajax fetch. But it had no opinion on how you should structure your app. Angular, Backbone and Ember is from the same post-jQuery era when talks about Web components started. > Being standardized, i.e. any old framework that can work with the DOM can with them But does a developer really care that it's possible to use the same component in different frameworks, when you need it to work with just one (yours)? I think the biggest fallacy is that people expect a technology to appear where you could just drop the component and it would work perfectly. From my experience, that will never happen - external component libraries are 90% what you need and 10% of hacking around missing features. The easier it is to safely and predictable hack the last 10% the better the framework/component library is. Web Components provide nothing that help in UI development: Helps manage multiple components state? Nope. Provide a declarative API for components? Nope, imperative - the one we are trying to get away from. Prevent CSS from affecting components? Cool, or I could just not write global styles, use BEM or CSS modules. Easy to share components? NPM still works just fine for that. > It's a massive waste of resources that M > 1 Agreed, that's something I thought a lot about. So I have created a cross-framework visual component editor - one component exports to many frameworks: https://github.com/UgnisSoftware/ugnis https://github.com/UgnisSoftware/ugnis
    - lomnakkus 9y ago
      > Angular, Backbone and Ember is from the same post-jQuery era when talks about Web components started. Really? Maybe I was just out of the loop. I hope we can agree that Web Components were little more than a gleam in somebody's eye at that point, right? (I'd love if you could point to any relevant mailing list/google groups discussions or whatever around this time, because apparently I missed 'em.) > But does a developer really care that it's possible to use the same component in different frameworks, when you need it to work with just one (yours)? Yes! I often have to work with multiple frameworks. Also: It'd be fanstastic if I had a choice matrix of "N" vs. "MxN" when I had to choose an implementation of, say, a scrollable-live-loading-table. That would be amazing, especially since we'd already decided on the "M" axis and written 20k LoC! I could choose the very best feature set for me! Ok, I might have to write a thin "shim" to have it interact with React or Vue.js or whatever, but the point is that this would be a trivial shim. I wouldn't have to rewrite the whole frontend when $BOSS decides that they want SuperLongUberTable. The mere fact that the contents of such a table are just DOM nodes would also mean that I would be able to publish (as OSS) our own implementation of said beast... to much acclaim and prestige. I also appreciate the fact that changing "NxM" to "N" means that (eventually) we'll get higher-quality components. For example, the components shipped in your browser are actually quite good. How many "good" video players did you see before HTML5 <video/>? My point is: The fact that anyone can write them means that there'll be a sort of evolutionary competition which tends towards an (admittedly, local) maximum -- but it's not as if the framework world has done much better, so... (Of course this is still at least a little hypothetical. We'll see, but I'm cautiously optimistic.) EDIT: I might not have articulated it, but I think it goes without saying that I obviously want all components to evolve towards the "stateless-and-emits-events-to-container-components" model of e.g. React... and I think that will happen because it's simply easier to integrate into any framework.