Does anyone have a simple definition/explanation of Web Components? The only descriptions I find online call them "reusable widgets or components in web documents," which is kind of meaningless since all code could be considered reusable.
The simplest explanation I've come across is that web components lets you create pockets of html, css, and JavaScript that are self-contained and, importantly, not affected by the actions of external css and JavaScript.
The browser vendors originally created it for themselves so that they could do things like build a standardized html5 video player interface using html but without worrying about you iterating over the internal elements in js or screwing up the buttons with css.
you take all your standard html5 stuff, bundle it in one file, and serve that to any client that wants a video player. You can, of course, play minification games or whatever to reduce the number of files - but the pure form is, one include == one component.
A new generation of web developers gets to rediscover desktop native widgets, 20 years later.