I don't know if they fixed it, but when reddit rewrote their menu with web components, it required 100+ http requests to render.
Nothing to fix, mostly. Those are static requests and get cached.
It's a menu, not a nuclear plant dashboard.
There is no problem here, whether you have a page that requests a static file 1000 times in a nested DOM or a single time. The outcome is still only a single request.
imports are not fetched by JS fetch. They are fetched by the browser. It happens before any JS in the component is even run.
That's why web components force request cascades: for every import the browser fetches the script, parses it, and starts fetching imports there, recursively.
Edit: it's also one of the reasons why bundling exists in most JS build tools. `import` was conceived when parallel fetching over http2 was right around the corner... and never materialized. So why make potentially hundreds of inneficient network calls (with browsers restricting them to something like 4 at a time), when you can just collocate code and dependencies?
I use fetch instead of imports for web components because I have a web component that does client-side includes, and it's literally easier to do client-side includes in a performance manner than anything else, including the recursive case.
Yes you can invent all kinds of workarounds for their core design. Re-implementing imports like you do. Or bundling, like everyone does and something that even lit recommends: https://lit.dev/docs/tools/production/
And we're back to my original comment - imports get served from the local cache, so a bit of a nothing-burger in the great scheme of things.
The "nothing burger" is so significant that even projects whose stance is "web components are the end all be all of web development" like lit recommend bundling.
Basically in my own render DSL like, I do this:
import { customElement, define, shadow } from '...';
export const ExampleInput = define((props, ctx) => {
const sheet = ctx.useRemoteStyleSheet(styleSheetUrl);
const onInput = ctx.useHandler(...);
const onKeyDown = ctx.useHandler(...);
// ...
const field = input
.css({ opacity: sheet.loaded ? '1' : '0' })
.on(onInput, onKeyDown)
.void({ type: 'text', value: text, disabled, className });
return customElement('akst-input-number')
.shadow(shadow.css(sheet).c(field))
.void({ className: hostClassName });
});
Before that I had a more manual process where fetches had to go through a style sheet loading "service" (or a light stateful wrapper over one). This was before I effectively made the above react like clone. Now that just happens behind the scenes, instead of all the nasty wiring I had with the web component class.