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My friend and I decided to start a project. This friend and I have had discussions where he espoused how libraries like Webpack, React, Redux, etc. just overcom

My friend and I decided to start a project. This friend and I have had discussions where he espoused how libraries like Webpack, React, Redux, etc. just overcomplicate the web. I decided to humor him and do a "simple" stack of lit-html, vanilla JS and ES6 modules (since they landed in browsers). It took us maybe...a day to pedal that back? The first thing to go was doing ES6 imports in the browser. I forget the exact sequence of events but the MIME issue definitely showed up, along with maybe an untrusted source issue. Say what you will about Webpack, but native ES6 modules are definitely not here yet.

hunterloftis 6y ago
> a "simple" stack of lit-html, vanilla JS and ES6 modules This is precisely how I’ve been building tableofsending.com and it’s been a lovely experience. You do need some babel/tsc/etc build step to reach a reasonable audience.
- _hardwaregeek 6y ago
  Yeah I bet once you get the stack up and running, as well as smooth out the inevitable early adopter bugs of lit-html, you'll have a great experience. The subtext of this was my friend constantly telling me easy and simple it'd be versus React. When in fact each stack has its tradeoffs and incidental complexity.
  - spankalee 6y ago
    lit-html has been used in production for over 2 years now, on sites with billions of page views a day. At this point no one new to it would be an early adopter :) The issue with module loading is a pretty fundamental one, though pretty unrelated to web components. Once you understand it, there are a large number of tools that make them work. The core problem is that most modules available on npm are written with import specifiers that assume the environment supports Node's module name result. Browsers don't, so it won't load something like `import * as redux from 'redux';` The solution is a tool that transforms package names into URLs. Webpack, Rollup, Parcel, es-dev-server, Snowpack, Vite, unpkg.com, Polymer CLI, and many more do this for you. More and more of the ecosystem is moving to native modules and we're all going to have to understand this issue.
    - _hardwaregeek 6y ago
      ReasonReact has been used in production for 3 years now, with billions of page views a day. I'd still call it immature in many^[1] regards :D The particular point of this project was to prove that each successive simplification that my friend proposed, i.e. avoiding Webpack for native ES6 modules, using lit-html instead of React, etc. introduced its own complexity. I'm not saying that these were all bad ideas, but just that they're fundamentally tradeoffs. I'm quite sure lit-html is a great stack. But it's not "better" than React any more than React is "better" than Angular. [1]: Lack of async/await, or its equivalent, let+ in OCaml 4.08, is a big one. Mediocre typings for browser APIs is another.

hunterloftis 6y ago

> a "simple" stack of lit-html, vanilla JS and ES6 modules This is precisely how I’ve been building tableofsending.com and it’s been a lovely experience. You do need some babel/tsc/etc build step to reach a reasonable audience.

_hardwaregeek 6y ago
Yeah I bet once you get the stack up and running, as well as smooth out the inevitable early adopter bugs of lit-html, you'll have a great experience. The subtext of this was my friend constantly telling me easy and simple it'd be versus React. When in fact each stack has its tradeoffs and incidental complexity.
- spankalee 6y ago
  lit-html has been used in production for over 2 years now, on sites with billions of page views a day. At this point no one new to it would be an early adopter :) The issue with module loading is a pretty fundamental one, though pretty unrelated to web components. Once you understand it, there are a large number of tools that make them work. The core problem is that most modules available on npm are written with import specifiers that assume the environment supports Node's module name result. Browsers don't, so it won't load something like `import * as redux from 'redux';` The solution is a tool that transforms package names into URLs. Webpack, Rollup, Parcel, es-dev-server, Snowpack, Vite, unpkg.com, Polymer CLI, and many more do this for you. More and more of the ecosystem is moving to native modules and we're all going to have to understand this issue.
  - _hardwaregeek 6y ago
    ReasonReact has been used in production for 3 years now, with billions of page views a day. I'd still call it immature in many^[1] regards :D The particular point of this project was to prove that each successive simplification that my friend proposed, i.e. avoiding Webpack for native ES6 modules, using lit-html instead of React, etc. introduced its own complexity. I'm not saying that these were all bad ideas, but just that they're fundamentally tradeoffs. I'm quite sure lit-html is a great stack. But it's not "better" than React any more than React is "better" than Angular. [1]: Lack of async/await, or its equivalent, let+ in OCaml 4.08, is a big one. Mediocre typings for browser APIs is another.