Comment by JimDabell
7 hours ago
Web components were such a big disappointment. 200% the complexity for 20% of the functionality. Everything coming out of that area seems to be hideously over-engineered while failing to solve the problems people wanted them to.
My feeling is that they were focused on designing something that is aimed at building form controls, not the kinds of components web developers use in practice. They are designed to make browser vendors’ lives easier, not web developers. That’s often excused with “web components excel at ‘leaf‘ components” when what is actually meant is “web components are bad at everything else”.
I would expect an actually good solution that fits in with the web’s architecture to come from the direction of HTMX, not web components.
> Safari argued that there should be a declarative ways for this 15 years ago
True, but they were equally able to propose and deploy alternative solutions and mostly just went along with web components (with exceptions of course).
> True, but they were equally able to propose and deploy alternative solutions and mostly just went along with web components (with exceptions of course).
Safari doesn't have as many engineers (a shame) and definitely doesn't have as many people whose apparent job is just to sit on standards committees and generate specs (like Alex Russel, Justin Fangnani etc.).
They did end up proposing declarative template instantiation in 2017: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposal... but that mostly went nowhere
That looks interesting – certainly a lot simpler and closer to web developers’ needs than what ended up getting standardised.
It really is a shame Apple don’t invest more in WebKit and the web standards process. Although they’ve been doing a lot better over the past few years.