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Web Components: The Framework-Free Renaissance

https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2026/02/17/web-components-the-framework-free-renaissance.html
27•mpweiher•3h ago

Comments

foobarbecue•1h ago
I skimmed this. I use web components a lot. Unless I'm mistaken, they don't provide reactivity; you have to write that yourself. Reactivity was the feature that launched modern js frameworks so I think the article really overstates the case.

The article also misses something more important: broad native ES module support in browsers means you don't need a build step (webpack).

The "AI makes it easy!" part of the article makes me want to hurl as usual. And I'll stop short of an accusation but I will say there were some suspicious em dash comparison clauses in there.

dankobgd•1h ago
you have `observedAttributes` and a callback to react whenever they change. That is basically it.
desdenova•57m ago
You can use lit-html to get declarative reactivity, but then it's just basically react again.
tym0•1h ago
Do you still have to pass every args as json/strings or has there been an improvement on that front?
lloydatkinson•45m ago
It's still exactly like that.
balloob•10m ago
This has never been the case. Custom elements are DOM Elements and so are just JavaScript objects. Just like you can do aEl.disabled = true, you can set any prop to any type of value.
lloydatkinson•53m ago
> they don't provide reactivity; you have to write that yourself. Reactivity was the feature that launched modern js frameworks so I think the article really overstates the case.

This is the truth that a lot of web component advocates gloss over on purpose. They know this, just like they know that there's no decent templating solution either as tagged template literals still need escaping. Then there is efficient DOM updates, etc. (aside, I got Claude to write a web component recently, and it's code had every single keystroke assigning the same class to the element)

There are many features like this, and when you finally get them to admit it, they just say "write your own"!. Well guess what, frameworks already provide all of this.

The really funny part is that Stencil, one of the popular tools for writing web components actually does provide all of the above! Their web components have exactly the same type of features you'd expect in any other framework *because it IS a framework*.

Which again highlights how stupid the discourse is here. It's not "independence" of frameworks, your components will still depend on a framework of some kind, be that Stencil or Lit or whichever thing YouTube uses now or your own supporting code to get back even half the features you get elsewhere.

It all starts to make sense when you realise that the Chrome developers hated frameworks because they didn't understand them, pushed for web components, not realising frameworks dealt with all of the above.

https://youtu.be/UrS61kn4gKI?t=1921 32:00 (but the whole video is valuable and I wish everyone on both sides of this debate would watch the whole thing).

I think the only thing I like about web components is they scope "this" to the element it owns.

dankobgd•1h ago
I just wish declarative shadow dom had bit better support or declarative custom elements landed already. Problem is that now i have to duplicate the template part, instead of just declaring it once and then specifying component instances many times.
cube00•1h ago
The question is no longer whether they work, but why more developers haven’t embraced them.

Anytime it's attempted, someone tries to scare them into thinking that their code will impossible to maintain without a framework to provide "structure"

LtWorf•1h ago
I see it a lot with people who ask for help about learning python.

According to the people "helping" them, before writing any line of code you should learn about ruff, uv, pip, venv, black, isort and so on… I guess most people aren't good at imagining other situations than their present one.

smashah•1h ago
I used to write all my webapps in pure lit webcomponents but eventually moved onto react
arianvanp•58m ago
I tried Web Components to create a `<passkey>` element to allow Passkey support in forms without having to write javascript as an end-user.

I ran into https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/814

As long as this is not fixed I can't take Web Components seriously.

vazark•48m ago
The biggest issue is the lack of tooling and the inability to manage a shared state. We actually ended up creating new libraries like Stencil & Lit.

Custom Elements missed the mark with the problem frameworks solve. We don't necessarily need custom HTML, we needed easy way to build and manage the whole data and visual flow locally while treating the backend response as a datasource.

Nowadays, I use web components for one-off, isolated components as a replacement for iframes, but rarely for anything complex.

_heimdall•41m ago
The shadow DOM and all the encapsulated CSS shenanigans it comes with has get to win me over. I do reach for custom elements quite often though.

A lot of times I just need a small component with state simple enough that it can live in the DOM. Custom elements gives me lifecycle hooks which is often all I really need for a basic component.

lbreakjai•27m ago
> A component deep in your UI hierarchy can dispatch an event that bubbles up through the DOM tree

Sounds like people are about to rediscover why Redux came to be.

KostblLb•25m ago
i think now with signals proposal to new ecmascript, one can easily have both web components and reactivity. my main question is, which tool do you use to have normal html syntax highlighting inside web components?
hackrmn•22m ago
Every time Web Components is being fronted, one has to duly inform the reader that Apple _rightfully_ refuses to implement what in my humble opinion is at least one broken piece of the specification that if implemented -- and it is implemented faithfully by Chrome and Firefox browsers -- in principle breaks the Liskov's Substitution Principle: * https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013OctD... * https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2016JanM... To be fair, this only concerns so-called "custom elements" that need inheriting existing HTML element functionality, but the refusal is well explained IMO. Meanwhile everyone else is just chugging along, like it tends to happen on the Web (e.g. History API giving way to Navigation API that in large part was designed to supercede the former).

To all of the above I might add that without "custom elements" Web Components is severely crippled as a feature. If I want to sub-class existing functionality, say a `table` or `details`, composition is the only means to do it, which in the best style on the Web, produces a lot of extra code noone wants to read. I suppose minimisation is supposed to eliminate the need to read JavaScript code, and 99% of every website out there features absolutely unreadable slop of spaghetti code that wouldn't pass paid review in hell. With Web Components that don't implement "custom elements" (e.g. in Safari) it's a essentially an OOP science professor's toy or totem. And since professors like their OOP theory, they should indeed take Liskov's principle to heart -- meaning the spec. is botched in part.

ernsheong•15m ago
I’m an early fan (Polymer, anyone?) but somehow the mindshare is just not there and trying to evangelize it to mainstream was too much. So now it just kinda there for people to slowly discover when they run into niche use cases.
lukax•8m ago
Wow, XSS just waiting to happen.

  <h3>${this.getAttribute('title')}</h3>

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