Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

WebComponents in general are a solution in search of a problem.

Despite being 6 years in development:

- they basically delivered none of the original promises

- they are extremely cumbersome to use without a library/framework on top (Polymer is the jQuery of WebComponents)

- they are plagued by multiple problems and shifts in the ecosystem (browsers don't want to support `is=`, HTML imports are being dropped in favour of ES6 imports)

- they have multiple problems integrating with existing frameworks: https://custom-elements-everywhere.com (basically any framework that bastardises HTML syntax is ok, anything relying on Javascript only is in trouble)

Don't hold your breath for the next couple of years as everyone tries to figure out how to work with them.

Custom Elements are quickly gaining traction. They're in Chrome and Safari, and will be in Edge/FF soon based on discussions with those teams. The Angular team is toying with using them directly (not sure if this will ever come to fruition or not). We'll work with the React team to get it working with better compatibility. Right now our components work in React use just need to use a tiny "polyfill" wrapper. The experience in React isn't as good as we'd like, but it's pretty darn solid in Preact.

To me, it doesn't seem like too big of a stretch to think that the popular frameworks of today will move to the custom element spec instead of their own proprietary component model.

> WebComponents in general are a solution in search of a problem

Maybe they don't solve your problem, but they certainly seem to solve Ionic's or Netflix's problems (or mine for that matter).

"React seems to solve Facebook's problems (or mine for that matter)"

"Vue.js seems to solve Gitlab's problems (or mine for that matter)"

etc.

Throwing big names around amounts to pretty much nothing.

But thats exactly true, companies build solutions that solve their problems. No secret knowledge here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com