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.
i is=”the walrus”
In which Brian takes a long winding route through an explanation of why the is attribute for custom elements is dead before he demonstrates the correct way to use web components:
<!-- instead of writing this -->
<input type="radio" is="x-radio">
<!-- you write this -->
<x-radio>
<input type="radio">
</x-radio>
Sadly, none of the showcase examples I’ve seen for web components do this.
Related links
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It’s all depressingly familiar, but it’s very weird to come across this kind of outdated thinking in 2023.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
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.
Using Stencil to make a live poll Web Component
Before getting into the details of the code, Matt hits the nail on the head talking about the the one thing that web components have that no framework can offer: longevity.
Quoting Stuart Brand:
Old systems break in familiar ways. New systems break in unexpected ways.
Well! The web is an old system.
Related posts
Mistrust
How Apple’s penchant for breaking the web has given me more empathy towards developers who are suspicious of the web platform.
The datalist element on iOS 26
Once again, Safari has fucked up its implementation.
Going Offline is online …for free
Read the book I wrote about service workers. It’s all yours.
The datalist element on iOS
Some buggy behaviour has been fixed in iOS 18 but now there’s a new bit of weirdness.
Speculation rules and fears
Browser are user agents, not developer agents.