> What am I missing, what's the elevator pitch for web-components and shadow DOM? There's none except the oft-repeated "use the platform!" (as if other framewo

> What am I missing, what's the elevator pitch for web-components and shadow DOM? There's none except the oft-repeated "use the platform!" (as if other frameworks and libraries use something else, and not the platform). Currently web components work, if: - you have a large distributed team, and - you need to have consistent elements and styling across many properties, and - your components can be expressed as "leaf elements". That is, view-only elements. No forms, no state, only presenting some data. Beyond that the elevator pitch is "for the past 10 years, and counting, we've been bravely trying to fix the ever-growing list of problems that web components introduced by simply being. And we're solving that by throwing more and more javascript at the problem". A very non-exhaustive list: https://twitter.com/rich_harris/status/1198332398561353728?lang=en https://twitter.com/rich_harris/status/1198332398561353728?l... And things like participation in forms? It's "solved" by adding Javascript: https://web.dev/more-capable-form-controls/ https://web.dev/more-capable-form-controls/ Which is ironic, given that the original pitch was "we're piling more and more into Javascript, and we shouldn't" https://fronteers.nl/congres/2011/sessions/web-components-and-model-driven-views-alex-russell https://fronteers.nl/congres/2011/sessions/web-components-an...: --- start quote --- I think we’re stuck today in a little bit of a rut of extensibility. We wind up leaning on JavaScript to get things, because it is the Turing complete language in our environment. It is the only thing that can give us an answer when CSS and HTML fail us. So we wind up piling ourselves into the JavaScript boat. We keep piling into the JavaScript boat. Bruce yesterday brought up the great example of an empty body tag, and sort of this pathological case of piling yourself into the JavaScript boat, where you wind up then having to go recreate all of the stuff that the browser was going to do more or less for you if you’d sent markup down the wire in order to get back to the same value that was going to be provided to you if you’d done it in markup. But you did it for a good reason. Gmail has an empty body tag, not because it’s stupid. Gmail does that because that’s how you can actually deliver the functionality of Gmail in a way that’s both meaningful and reliable and maintainable. You wind up putting all of your bets, all of your eggs, into the JavaScript basket. --- end quote ---