Disclosure: I maintain an open source web component library.
This is a strange take on what I think the author is fighting against: a less open web platform. What confuses me is how the adoption of Web Components will somehow make things worse than they already are. Take a look at any contemporary web framework and you'll see there's little overlap in compatibility or portability -- sometimes even between versions of the same library!
I've seen first hand how difficult web components can be, but they're still a better solution than trusting the foundations of the web to the teams at Angular or React. In my opinion we need an API that lets young developers start their web apps with plain HTML/CSS/JS without experiencing into the same decades-old issues that created frameworks in the first place. How should an intermediate developer beging organizing their CSS? Or importing helpful libraries? Or even something as simple as making a reusable HTML template without spending any time in Webpack?
The truth is that we don't have easy answers for these aspiring developers, and we won't get any sympathy from them by demanding the web return to it's document roots. I think Web Components can solve all these issues with some guidance from the community. The platform is ready and so are we.
I am inclined to agree with this comment indeed.
Having had to learn a lot about these things recently (and trying to stay away from frameworks), it is quite difficult to not feel 'boxed in' by the rules imposed by React, Vue, etc.
I feel as though one is encouraged to learn a framework instead of the basics. Having learned the basics, I can now see why there are frameworks, and what their uses are, but often I wonder whether people decide to do something in [x] framework to make their work sound cool, before even knowing what it is they are building.
I absolutely agree. Not only can Web Components simplify web development and lower the barrier to entry, they can also bridge the gap between frameworks and the modern modular web.
As a developer who works in an enterprise environment, frameworks like React and Angular are our boon and bane. Beyond the advertised features, they are amazing at providing repeatable patterns for developers and offer structure to large and small projects alike. And in my experience, they have proven to be significantly smaller, more performant, and more maintainable than the vanilla JS apps that were being delivered to clients previously. Also, it is because of legacy browsers that we still need all the features these libraries and frameworks provide. Many of our clients are just now moving away from IE 10 and 11, and tools like these have kept us all sane.
So we take the cost of learning frameworks, bundling through webpack, and being tied into proprietary ecosystems, because the trade off is worth it to us when our focus is delivering value to the business and functionality to our customers.
Enter Web Components. Trying to maintain branding, coherent styles, accessibility, and a cohesive user experience across an entire enterprise can be a huge undertaking. Common component libraries help, but the multiple frameworks used throughout a company can result in duplicated and triplicated work. Web Components offer us the promise of creating these assets once and including them in any application we build, regardless of framework. And since they are spec compliant and framework agnostic, changing to a new framework--or no framework--in the future doesn't have the added cost of rewriting every component to match the new lib/framework API.
To address some other comments here, it's worth discussing who controls the specs, and what's the right path for the future of the web, but we still have to develop for the world we live in today.
This is a strange take on what I think the author is fighting against: a less open web platform. What confuses me is how the adoption of Web Components will somehow make things worse than they already are. Take a look at any contemporary web framework and you'll see there's little overlap in compatibility or portability -- sometimes even between versions of the same library!
I've seen first hand how difficult web components can be, but they're still a better solution than trusting the foundations of the web to the teams at Angular or React. In my opinion we need an API that lets young developers start their web apps with plain HTML/CSS/JS without experiencing into the same decades-old issues that created frameworks in the first place. How should an intermediate developer beging organizing their CSS? Or importing helpful libraries? Or even something as simple as making a reusable HTML template without spending any time in Webpack?
The truth is that we don't have easy answers for these aspiring developers, and we won't get any sympathy from them by demanding the web return to it's document roots. I think Web Components can solve all these issues with some guidance from the community. The platform is ready and so are we.