RErektide·Sep 30, 2020
It would have helped a lot if JS had a working modules systems on the web.
> What hope do those who can’t write JS have? Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of npm flugelhorn, import clownshoes, build quux, all completely unapologetically because “here is my truckload of dependencies, yeah, what”.
JS has been in a dark & ugly spot, & WebComponents feeling janky & weird is probably 50% the fact that JS is this dark twisting maze where each project has it's own very unique assumptions about how to turn authored JS into usable, deployable JS. We're still hoping, praying that import-maps eventually give us modular javascript code that we can deploy, without having to push it through a handful of compile/build tools: https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/issues/4810
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opts some suggested normative best paths people can work with (ex, create-react-app bundling build/test/&c tools). Alas, the language itself is still, a decade latter, trying to proceed to useable modules on the web.
The other major point of this article tends towards a JS vs HTML problem, another area I am very sympathetic to & have hopes for.
> Far more people can write HTML than JS. Even for those who do eventually write JS, it often comes after spending years writing HTML & CSS. [...] If components are designed in a way that requires JS, this excludes thousands of people from using them.
There are ongoing efforts with HTML Modules ( https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4854408103854080 ) to try to make, among other things, bringing in WebComponents much easier, and Declarative Custom Elements ( https://blog.usejournal.com/w3c-declarative-custom-elements-... ) to make building modules much more HTML-centric & declarative versus today where most of the authoring of a custom element has to be done in JS.
There are very real problems, there is too much js, the js module system is still in a 1/2 complete state on the web, & these very much dog Web Components. But the future is exciting, & I continue to have hope that a much better, much more web native way of building emerges on the web platform. Lea talks a lot to how scattershot the last decade of work has been, how inconsistent, but given the other ecosystem constraints I'm not fully surprised, & I'm delighted that we are spending so long building & experimenting & learning, that for many of us, the hunger is very real. Also missing, the big adopters of WebComponents have been pretty silent, their thought-leadership seems missing: Youtube, Github. There are visible people from these worlds talking about WebComponents, but to my knowledge the real experience of WebComponents at scale from the very successful adopters remains a story not told.