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Discussion on: Why the React community is missing the point about Web Components

 
dan_abramov profile image
Dan Abramov

My spidey-sense is tingling. The React team isn't the w3c or the whatwg. Big questions that affect the future of the web should be the purview of standards bodies, not library authors. I'm not against awesome JS that makes things work in lieu of agreed-upon standards, (and let me take a moment to praise your team for their technical accomplishments) but we have a standard component model now - one that's not just theoretically standardized but also universally implemented

This is precisely my point. I think you're both asking that we do implement a tighter WC integration, and also that we don't make any decisions about how it should interop with React (and thus impact questions like server rendering). These are mutually exclusive requirements. And they're the reason we haven't historically been hurrying with this despite efforts like custom-elements-everywhere.com/.

React's success has made babel and webpack de rigueur requirements (I just spent an hour with a mentee unscrewing babel for a one-file 700 LOC react js script for a wordpress site. Madness!)

Re: Babel, fair, although you could use it as a JSX-only transform if you don't care about newer JS features. React doesn't force you to use ES6. I found it curious that people who complain a lot about JSX tend to also love SASS — which, if you think about it — is a transform just like JSX.

Re: webpack, this has nothing to do with React. People use it because they write more complex apps, and shipping them as a single bundle without code splitting (or as ES6 modules!) hurts the users. If you don't need bundling, you can use React as a script tag and not do any bundling: reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-we...

a lot of the advocacy for react has come as mud slinging against standards

Let me know when you see it and I'd be happy to chime in! I've also seen a lot of unjustified stabs back at React which doesn't help either.

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thepassle profile image
Pascal Schilp • Edited

Can't believe im about to be 'that guy' on an internet forum saying this, but im running out of fingers to count the times I've shook my head after seeing a "use the platform LOL" jab from the React community.

Having said that, I really do appreciate the sentiment of your comments in this thread, and you taking the time to engage in (what feels like an actual fruitful) discussion!

Overall it doesn't seem like we disagree on many things?

I wish these discussions were less polarized in general.

So now that we've established this, perhaps we can all slow down with the mud throwing a bit?

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dan_abramov profile image
Dan Abramov • Edited

im running out of fingers to count the times I've shook my head after seeing a "use the platform LOL" jab from the React community.

Sure and I'd like to see this fade away. But I think we also both know exactly where this sentiment comes from: the feeling of alienation. Some developer advocates shame developers for large bundles — and in many ways, this is justified. But often there's a sense that they forget why we ended up here.

React users would love to not have to npm install a date picker and bloat their bundles! If they need to "use the platform" then why doesn't that platform ship the features they actually ask for? Instead of a <carousel> they get an <aside>. Features like service workers are touted as a solution to many problems in the web, but their ergonomics are so under-designed that people actually have to change domains to bust the cache from a broken build (I’m not making this up).

Now again, I understand the other side to all of this. Standards are hard etc. But I think the aggressive anti-library message (while promoting a library on top of WCs) coupled with not listening to people's problems has somewhat poisoned the "use the platform" movement. That's why many people perceive it as sarcastic now, unfortunate as it is.

I'd like to see that change though! On the React team, recently we have been tightly working with browser vendors. There is a sense that people are more receptive to hearing things we learned, and we're very optimistic about this progress.

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦
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dan_abramov profile image
Dan Abramov

Great stuff! I'm sure a lot of developers will appreciate this as a move in the right direction.