HTML Web Components | Go Make Things

Lived experience

I hold this truth to be self-evident: the larger the abstraction layer a web developer uses on top of web standards, the shorter the shelf life of their codebase becomes, and the more they will feel the churn.

How Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With Web Components - The New Stack

“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”

Why were they slow? The answer: React.

“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”

Liskov’s Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components – Baldur Bjarnason

React has become a bloated carcass of false promises, misleading claims, and unending layers of backwards compatibility – the wrong kind of backwards compatibility, as they still occasionally break your fucking code when updating.

Pretty much anything else is a better tool for pretty much any web development task.

Cameron Dutro on ruby.social

Here’s the inside scoop on why Github is making a bizarre move from working web components to a legacy React stack.

Most of what I heard in favor of React was a) it’s got a good DX, b) it’s easy to hire for, and c) we only want to use it for a couple of features, not the entire website.

It’s all depressingly familiar, but it’s very weird to come across this kind of outdated thinking in 2023.

My personal prediction is that, eventually, the company (and many other companies) will realize how bad React is for most things, and abandon it. I guess we’ll see.

Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework | jakelazaroff.com

Decision time:

There’s a cost to using dependencies. New versions are released, APIs change, and it takes time and effort to make sure your own code remains compatible with them. And the cost accumulates over time.

This post is about more than web components:

If we want our work to be accessible in five or ten or even 20 years, we need to use the web with no layers in between. For all its warts, the web has become the most resilient, portable, future-proof computing platform we’ve ever created — at least, if we build with that in mind.