Apple Just Shipped Web Components to Production

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18 points·TimTheTinker··6 comments

Is this article just complaining that nobody on HN noticed the fact that Apple used Web Components, and somebody should have because it's a big deal?

What did the web components enable? It’s a little unclear how this is different from just building them as html/JavaScript or what sort of functionality this unlocks.

It sounds like you may not be familiar with Web Components as a group of web standards (HTML imports, shadow DOM, templates, and custom elements). The idea was to allow the creation of self-contained, abstracted UI components with their own HTML/JS/CSS that each exposed a carefully crafted public API but hide (and protect) their implementation from code on the rest of the page.

It was big news about 5 years ago but discussion has waned as browser vendors failed to agree on or implement varying parts of the group of standards.

Since then, polyfills and libraries have tried to fill in missing gaps, to varying degrees of success. Google’s Polymer was the most prominent.

The issue, for both browser APIs and libraries/polyfills, continues to be the lack of a mainstream or standard approach to implementing self-contained UI components.

Like an iframe meets a library? Is there an example use case where the benefit is clear? Is this UI as a service is disguise?

I've been cynical & critical about iOS Safari's standards compliance. I hope their own use of web components and other modern web standards leads to better compliance for iOS Safari.

Glitch in the Matrix: Internet Explorer had something like this in 1998. :-)

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