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Why don't more developers “use the platform”?

304 points · 318 comments · vinhnx

  1. jchw · · focus · HN ↗
    For one thing, I just genuinely think WebComponents are a badly designed API that is weird and hard to use (how many people are using WebComponents without at least Lit, if not something much bigger?), and React is a relatively well-designed library that isn't really that bloated. There's not really much of a point in trying to argue since this is inherently subjective and people with different values are going to irreconcilably disagree. But, if you don't respect that some people hold this position, we're not going to make any progress towards a consensus.

    On the note of <dialog>, I recently tried to use <dialog> in a (React) application, and it did work pretty well, but I also found that in Firefox it is only practically possible to do a fade-in animation, not a fade-out one. That isn't really a critical issue for me, it is just an animation after all, but I find it unfortunate. I also find <dialog> to be a weirdly shaped API too: I don't really hate it, but I don't love it either. It feels awkward.

    I find this implicit view that developers that, for example, prefer React over WebComponents are making a suboptimal choice to be rather condescending and not really in the spirit of trying to see things from the other side. Wouldn't you want to focus on the strongest arguments and not the weakest ones? Maybe you've literally never heard anyone complain about WebComponents or Shadow DOM, but if so, I find that surprising. Certainly here on HN, I've seen a fair bit of WebComponents hate.

    I do, FWIW, realize that I've particularly focused on WebComponents, which this article doesn't actually name directly. But, I assume we're not talking about ditching React to implement our own component framework on top of the traditional DOM APIs, because that's what React already does...

    1. al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
      I have stubbornly avoided React. When native WebComponents became a thing, I figured I'd try them out on a small internal site I maintain. It was very slow. In an effort to reduce a bit of duplicate code, my site when from loading instantly to having a noticeable load time. Having to employ tricks to try and optimize and speed up the most basic implementation of a built-in feature seemed like the wrong move, so I ditched them all together and reverted back to my old structure.
      1. hnedeotes · · focus · HN ↗
        Not to piss on your experience, I use WebComponents for almost everything and they have a lot of issues (mostly they're not really integrated into a coherent model with the remaining things that always exist in their presence, the browser, DOM, lifecycles, requests, etc) but being slow can only be an issue of your implementation to be honest, it's an imperative model for the most part - in fact the reason why I've started using them was because it was much easier to make things fast easily - there's no way updating/replacing dom elements surgically is faster with any other framework.
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