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Jordan Austin
Jordan Austin

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Let's not pit web components against frameworks

Let me just get this out there: I love web components. I've been following their journey and I've been working with them since before they were supported in all major browsers. But here's the thing, I don't love seeing people fighting for web components by telling everyone to ditch frameworks.

If you want to do something radical with web components, I think the best place to start is reevaluating if you have a use for them in conjunction with your existing framework based projects.

To me, the sad part around the web components discussion is that some people believe that they are still "only a Google thing", or that Polymer === web components. The fact is, web components did get their early start from Google dating back to 2011. Since then, all major browser vendors have weighed in on them, made changes to the specs around web components, and collectively they produced a series of standards. Web components are all based on web standards (https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents). Early on, saying that web components were "only a Google thing" would have been somewhat true, but in 2019 it's a very different story. I just encourage you to take a fresh look at them and see how well supported they are in all major browsers, and see how many companies are using them in both large and small ways to accomplish many different things.

I don't think we need to try to pit web components against frameworks, that's not really the goal of web components. Instead, maybe just see if web components make sense for you or your team for creating pieces of an application for easy cross framework or frameworkless development. If it doesn't fit into anything you need or want, no problem. The nice part is that by reevaluating web components and the specs around them you can keep them in your mind for the future where they might be useful to you in another project. And as developers, by reacquainting ourselves with the standards that surround web components we can expand our toolbox 🧰 of web standards knowledge that we can tap into even outside the context of just web components.

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