DMdmitriid·Sep 4, 2017
> it's just that many of the elements created use Polymer, and that is probably a good indicator of how popular the tooling is in the component ecosystem.
That's exactly what I'm saying. There are no WebComponents. There is no x-tags or whatever. There is only Polymer. For many reasons. Chief among them: WebComponents suck. Polymer at least gives nice-ish APIs on top of that.
Rob did say something like "Polymer is the jQuery of WebComponents". And it's true.
One could argue that you can write your stuff in pure DOM APIs. Yet hardly enyone ever did that, because there was jQuery. All the handlebars and mustaches and other things of this world were largely irrelevant because of jQuery.
Now, jQuery solved a very pressing problem: it gave an easy, simple, extensible API that made working with the DOM a joy. It would be very nice if jQuery's
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approach was adopted by w3c, but that is really too much to ask for.
In 11 years since jQuery's original release w3c managed — barely! — to standardize on querySelector/querySelectorAll (already a much more cumbersome combination of APIs than jQuery's $).
Enter WebComponents. 6 years in development. Quite a few years of saying that they are the future. Let's do a reality check, shall we?
The APIs are horrible. None of the original promises are fulfilled. As Polymer 3 approaches someone suddenly starts asking "erm, guys, what are the best ways of creating WebComponents without Polymer".
- It turns out even people who implement the spec in the browser don't have reference components.
- It turns out the API is so bad, you have to use pseudocode in your presentation to sell people the idea[1].
- It turns out WebComponents are so effing great and can really be used to reimplement stuff in the browser, ... that you can't even implement a checkbox without reimplementing the checkbox label [2]
- It turns out people don't even know how WCs should work. Quote from [1]: "If we can generally agree on how Custom Elements should behave..."
- It turns out that actually implementing WCs in anything but Polymer is a royal pain in basically everywhere because w3c's goal was never to create a sane API for anything.
etc. etc. etc.
Therefore, forget selling people the idea of WebComponents. For all intents and purposes they do not exist. Only Polymer exists. Masochists can go and check out the underlying DOM APIs, of course.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK1ODp0nDbM
[2] https://github.com/GoogleChrome/howto-components/issues/112