Hacker News Reader

Comment by j-bos | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I think you're 100% right, it's the red tape more than the tech. My issue is that when an in house React component is poorly coded, it's trivial to inject css overrides or select internal elements of the component to change it's behavior. With web components, the events emitted are locked in, each sub element or worse sub web component is nested away and only accessible via the shadow dom making edge case or hot fix solutions that much more trouble to deal with. In both cases the ideal would be for the internal library maintainers to fix the issues or support the required features, but with ever long lead times, it's often necessary to work something out at the project level. The working out is much more abrasive with web components though.

In practice, this update is great for usability. But it's a sign that web components are still relevant, extending my time dealing with poorly built ones.

View on HN

I see. Particularly with CSS there's more of an enforced contract around how the element internals get exposed for styling. If the element hasn't exposed `parts` or slots it's hard to hack around it.

More broadly speaking I have found myself getting thrashed by the ever evolving "best practices" in the React ecosystem. First: write everything using class components, and then a couple years later everything should be written with hooks.

I think the benefit of web components (for certain things) is that the APIs and the standards move slowly. Something you write today isn't going to feel obsolete in only a couple years.

> select internal elements of the component

If you need an equivalent Expedient Field Hack for a web component, remember it's an HTMLElement subclass and ends up in the DOM. So you can get the object back out of the DOM as 'just another internal element' and gutwrench it from there (or, depending, subclass it and register your subclass, or insert an extra entry into its prototype chain, or ...).

I mean, yes, those are all horrible, but so's digging into the guts of a react component you don't own, sometimes taking a dependency on the internals of somebody else's code is the least horrible option.

... it occurs to me that given a JS Function's .toString() returns the source code, on an e.g. lit-html component you could probably even grab the render function, yank the html`...` call out of it, regexp that to tweak the mark up, and then use an indirect eval to stuff it back in.

But really, I think "you now have the element object, monkey patch it to taste" is probably quite sufficient and far, far less ridiculous than that last paragraph, I just couldn't resist sharing the horrifying thought :)

Yeah, worth noting that there IS an escape hatch for monkey-patching (at your own risk). So you're not totally out of luck. It is just HTMLElement all the way down

Reply on news.ycombinator.com