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It's not about Web Components vs. React

Stephen Belovarich on April 16, 2019

You often hear engineers comparing Web Components with React. Here's my take on it. Web Components are spec. Your web framework isn't. ...
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Leho Kraav

Web Components are a11y.
Customized built-in elements allow you to extend native elements like button, input, and select and implement your own functionality.

Except not for Safari. From developers.google.com/web/fundamen...

Note: Only Chrome 67 supports customized built-in elements (status) right now. Edge and Firefox will implement it, but Safari has chosen not to implement it. This is unfortunate for accessibility and progressive enhancement. If you think extending native HTML elements is useful, voice your thoughts on 509 and 662 on Github.

chromestatus.com/feature/467014692... with links to every major browser vendor status on the subject.

What's the solution here?

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Stephen Belovarich
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Leho Kraav

Thanks, but are we supposed to ignore Safari development team arguments then as not having much basis?

github.com/w3c/webcomponents/issue...

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Stephen Belovarich • Edited

No, Safari development team has some valid points, however the rest of the browsers have decided to implement customized built-in elements. Why should Apple engineers continue to resist over implementation details at the cost of failing to enhance Accessibility features for the greater community? Customized built-in elements made it into the spec. At some point they should just accept it.

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Leho Kraav • Edited

I don't have an answer to this. Maybe @webpadawan can chime in?

I do like polyfill author's comment github.com/w3c/webcomponents/issue...

With Edge on Chromium, only Safari is missing the train but the polyfill for Safari only, works fast and well, plus Safari is used on powerful devices so performance is not an issue.

Just wondering if safe to bring to my platform production code. We would like to extend article element to starters.

That GH thread should maybe be published as an e-book. Still wondering if I should read all of it.

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Serhii Kulykov

It is better to ask @webreflection who is the author of the customized builtin elements polyfill about how much is it safe to use in production.

The only thing I'm not sure about is whether Safari already supports customElements.upgrade used in that polyfill: github.com/ungap/custom-elements-b...

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Andrea Giammarchi

that polyfill is basically for Safari/WebKit only, so yes, it works there pretty well 😉

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Yinon Oved

good helpful info here 🙏
any news with this subject?

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Stephen Belovarich

There is another polyfill now that is regularly maintained customized built-in element support in Safari.

@corpuscule/custom-builtin-elements

Head of WebKit engineering wouldn’t confirm customized built-in elements are on the roadmap, but confirmed Apple never said they wouldn’t support it.

twitter.com/othermaciej/status/121...

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Andrea Giammarchi • Edited

Unfortunately, it has some problems that make it hard to use. For example, with the @ungap/custom-elements-builtin you cannot use class constructors or create new elements with the new operator.

There is github.com/ungap/custom-elements-new if you want to use new, not sure why that is an issue, but on top of that, there is github.com/WebReflection/document-... that brings custom elements + built-in extends already to every browser down to IE8.

The @ungap/custom-elements-builtin is specific for Safari/WebKit only, which is why it's 1.2K only

curl -Ls https://unpkg.com/@ungap/custom-elements-builtin | brotli | wc -c

that polyfill unminified size is 14K, plus it needs @webcomponents/webcomponentsjs to work, none of mine does.

document-register-element has been used by Google AMP Project for dunno how many years, so it is also battle-tested.

I really wish that polyfill author would've contributed to @ungap instead of creating yet another issue with polyfills and custom elements, I have experience with these since 2014 so maybe we could've solved together.

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Stephen Belovarich • Edited

I really wish you wouldn’t tell someone you don’t know they are creating issues right off the bat. I’m sure this fumble erases all the times I’ve supported Web Components, am I right? Jeez. People first, not code first. This isn’t an attack on the project or you. Getting along just fine with ‘ @corpuscule/custom-builtin-elements’ in my latest project, which doesn’t need to support deprecated browsers like IE8.

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Andrea Giammarchi • Edited

I haven't attacked anyone, and me and the @corpuscule/custom-builtin-elements author already clarified a few things in the repository, so that he changed the README about few wrong things mentioned about the @ungap/custom-elements-builtin alternative polyfill.

There are reasons that poly has the constructor caveat, but I'll let you test yourself if it was valid or not.

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Stephen Belovarich • Edited

I am not saying you attacked anyone, but your phrasing was rude in my opinion. No need for the last paragraph, just gratuitous.

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Andrea Giammarchi • Edited

I support Web Components (Custom Elements) since 2014 and before, and the @corpuscule/custom-builtin-elements had some FUD in the README regarding my polyfill, but it wasn't intentional, so that everything got sorted by me filing MR to that repository.

I guess there's some history behind you are missing, but the fact people prefer writing from scratch anything already available, instead of helping out, is one of the most obvious reasons Open Source has issues.

So, my comment was about that, and I've clarified with the author of the lib you have pointed me at, so, at least to me, is all good, I hope it's good to you too.

You're free to use whatever library you like, I just know that library has inevitably other issues, but I am not here to describe third party work.

Take care 👋

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Timothy Vernon

If we are comparing Web Components to React, is there a create-react-app comparison?

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Drew Taylor • Edited

Yes, almost all of the major UI web component based frameworks have this. A couple examples might be:

Angular:

npm install -g @angular/cli
ng new my-app

Vue:

npm install -g @vue/cli
vue create my-vueapp

*EDIT: However, as Steve suggests, you shouldn't bloat your project unnecessarily with an application framework if all you need is just one or two simple web components.

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Stephen Belovarich • Edited

Some of the web component libraries have that sort of thing:
github.com/ionic-team/stencil-comp...
github.com/CaptainCodeman/web-app-...

FWIW you don't need a lot to get started and IMHO create-react-app serves the most general of use cases so tooling like that can be hazardous for some projects. With web components all you need is a template index.html and some JavaScript and CSS. There are some polyfills, but they are minimal. None the less a starter project would be a decent idea or a CLI with scaffolding all the better. Parcel is primed for this kind of thing, so is Webpack. Rollup is even a fantastic idea here now that it can code spilt.

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Timothy Vernon

Thanks for those links.

I was looking around this past weekend for something that supported at least the following: TypeScript, Webpack, and Hot Module Reloading to make an app using Custom Elements. I only had an hour or two so I didn't want to write the Webpack config myself 😅 I ended up bailing because I couldn't find anything that looked like it was being actively developed.

Those two libraries you mentioned, neither has been touched for some months which makes me nervous relying on something that doesn't have an active community behind it.

Until there is a better community and tooling around Web Components, I will continue to sit back and watch.

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Stephen Belovarich

I find this very interesting as someone who codes a lot of build tooling when something doesn't exist. Tools like create-react-app and Angular CLI only really serve generic use cases. The moment you want to do something else the tool doesn't you most likely have to roll your own, or extend the tool as is the case with Angular CLI.

It takes a lot of time to roll your own, so I sympathize, but if there were a tool for bundling Web Components it probably would only handle the most generic use cases.

My current workflow can be cherry picked from Readymade UI, a web component SDK I've been building just for kicks.

github.com/readymade-ui/readymade

My dev build is currently just TypeScript. I run tsc in --watch mode. In TypeScript 3.3 --watch is using an incremental watcher by default.

typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/r...

The dev build isn't bundled, but I like that. It's fast.

The prod build uses rollup because well rollup is so easy to configure compared to anything else for me. Then I postprocess the output even more with PostHTML. PostHTML is a wonderful tool that transforms HTML templates. That's how I inlined nearly everything in the Github pages documentation for Readymade UI.

readymade-ui.github.io/readymade/

HTML Modules are coming and they will be a game changer.

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Jared Mahan

Have you guys taken a look at Stencil?(stenciljs.com/docs/introduction)

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Stephen Belovarich

Stencil 👍

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Cubicle Buddha

I would love to take advantage of web components, but my understanding is that the polyfills are flaky and that there aren’t enough component libraries out there that are built directly on web components (yet). I guess I’m just holding out till things stabilize a bit. But the future is very exciting. Btw, if someone does know of a web component library that has all the major UI widgets... I would be very very interested.

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Joe Strouth

Btw, if someone does know of a web component library that has all the major UI widgets... I would be very very interested.

The primary one that comes to mind is Ionic. Their latest version is all web components, built with Stencil (their typescript-powered WC compiler). Not a lot of other pre-built options though.

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Westbrook Johnson

This is a useful list: open-wc.org/faq/component-librarie... and lots more just around the corner...

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Drew Taylor • Edited

React is just one framework you can use for implementing web components. I feel like this article aids and confuses rather than disputes the current trend of treating React as its own component entity rather than as one implementation of web components

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Stephen Belovarich • Edited

Edited to hopefully clarify.

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Drew Taylor

Very cool, thanks @steveblue

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John Teague

Chromium based Edge will fully support CEs, as does Safari since 10.1. The PF are for pre-Chromium Edge and IE11. So, you really can use Web Components today.

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weedshaker

@steveblue , Very nice read but its time to update your article (browser support caniuse.com/?search=web%20components)! Also, consider your statement about state machine, since an event driven architecture with web components needs none: dev.to/weedshaker/dom-and-the-even...

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Stephen Belovarich

Updated to reflect Microsoft Edge supporting custom elements v1.

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mayankav

Informative discussion guys. Only 5 days ago Vue 3.2 release incorporated a very easy way to create web components. blog.vuejs.org/posts/vue-3.2.html