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Comment by FreeHugs | Hacker News Reader

I think we should spend a minute on what is meant with "components" in the article.

Would you say that this very site - Hacker News - is using this type of "components"?

The latest possible start date for components on the web was when PHP/fi (or whatever it was called) allowed you to ```include``` other files.

Realistically, people were probably doing the same with perl scripts before that.

And any definition of component is going to find it hard to exclude standard html elements, other than by specifying that it's users being able to define new ones, and not just browser vendors.

Incidentally, CSS was the original implementations of user-defined components: it allows defining certain behaviours once, for a "class" or group of similar elements, then using it repeatedly.

I remember when we loaded xml into a buffer in c and replaced template tags with search and replace.

I don't think that is the type of "component" the author means when he writes about a "component world". He constantly talks about his argument applies to "modern web apps".

I don't have the feeling that what he really means with "Inline CSS works better in a component world" is "Inline CSS is the better choice since the 90s".

Yes! A comment box is a component. The tree view you look at comments in are components. Usernames and scores are component. A shared „link“ on the frontpage is a component. HN is not rendered on the client side, but its backend uses these „components“ via a templating framework. Components are just templates for the frontend.

This definitely leads me to believe that you don't have much experience with modern web frameworks. The meaning of "component" in modern web development is pretty consistent. You can think of a component as a custom HTML element (though they can be much more complex than built-in HTML elements). In fact, if you are using HTML Web Components, then your component literally is a custom HTML element. But the metaphor works even when generating HTML server-side: If you can reference a piece of UI by name, and pass it attributes, and it packages up some HTML/CSS/JavaScript in a reusable fashion, then it's a component.

Your question is slightly nonsensical, because components are not a design language, and it's not something you can see by looking at a rendered web page. To know whether Hacker News is using components, I would need to look at the source code, because components are a programming paradigm.

If you're asking me to comb through HN's JavaScript to see if they use that paradigm, well, no thank you.

    This definitely leads me to believe that
    you don't have much experience with modern
    web frameworks

Here we go again. It would have suited the discussion even better if you said "it is definitely self evident".

But I explained why it led me to believe that. You're just...not gonna respond to any of my argument...are you?

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