On Web Components

God, it’s another post about Web Components and stuff, who am I to write this, who are you to read it

Carlana Johnson’s “Alternate Futures for Web Components” had me nodding all the way. There’s just this assumption that now that React is potentially on its way out (after a decade-long reign! not bad), the natural answer is Web Components. And I just don’t get it. I don’t get it. I think I’m a pretty open-minded guy, and I’m more than happy to test everything out, from Rails to Svelte to htmx to Elm. It’s all cool and good.

But “the problems I want to solve” and “the problems that Web Components solve” are like two distinct circles. What do they do for me? Binding JavaScript-driven behavior to elements automatically thanks to customElement? Sure - but that isn’t rocket science: you can get nice declarative behavior with htmx or hyperscript or alpine or stimulus. Isolating styles with Shadow DOM is super useful for embed-like components, but not for parts of an application where you want to have shared style elements. I shouldn’t sloppily restate the article: just read Carlana.

Anyway, I just don’t get it. And I find it so suspicious that everyone points to Web Components as a clear path forward, to create beautiful, fast applications, and yet… where are those applications? Sure, there’s “Photoshop on the Web”, but that’s surely a small slice of even Photoshop’s market, which is niche in itself. GitHub used to use Web Components but their new UIs are using React.

So where is it? Why hasn’t Netflix rebuilt itself on Web Components and boosted their user numbers by dumping the heavy framework? Why are interactive visualizations on the New York Times built with Svelte and not Web Components? Where’s the juice? If you have been using Web Components and winning, day after day, why not write about that and spread the word?

People don’t just use Rails because dhh is a convincing writer: they use it because Basecamp was a spectacular web application, and so was Ta-Da List, and so are Instacart, GitHub, and shopify. They don’t just use React because it’s from Facebook and some brain-virus took them over, they use it because they’ve used Twitter and GitHub and Reddit and Mastodon and countless other sites that use React to create amazing interfaces.

Of course there’s hype and bullying and all the other social dynamics. React fans have had some Spectacularly Bad takes, and, boy, the Web Components crowd have as well. When I write a tender post about complexity and it gets summed up as “going to bat for React” and characterized in bizarre overstatement, I feel like the advocates are working hard to alienate their potential allies. We are supposed to get people to believe in our ideas, not just try to get them to lose faith in their own ideas!

I don’t know. I want to believe. I always want to believe. I want to use an application that genuinely rocks, and to find out that it’s WC all the way, and to look at the GitHub repo and think this is it, this is the right way to build applications. I want to be excited to use this technology because I see what’s possible using it. When is that going to happen?

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint Exupéry