Comment by spankalee

Not unless you can develop an equivalent to React Native. That's the rub here: browser tech is just way slower than what can be achieved with native code. React's primary value (now) is deduping GUI development across platforms.

I worked on a business app made with lit web components and all properties being stringly typed was a real drag. It didn't compare to a realtime-first component library.

> Web components are the way out of this trap. Every single framework that isn't React should be wholeheartedly supporting web components to make sure that they have access to a viable ecosystem of components and utilities without having to bootstrap an entire competitor to React and it's ecosystem.

I've been using web components using a wrapper to avoid all boilerplate. It gets me 80% of web component functionality with very little effort: https://github.com/lelanthran/ZjsComponent

Discussed on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315

Now this is not perfect, but there is, for me, no easier way to create and use new html components.

At my large corporation, we are required to use a centralized React library for internal apps. So it is not “react by default”, but instead “React is the only choice”. 100% agree that our path out is for the central library to be reimplemented as web components to open us up to using whatever framework we choose.

Strong disagree. Web Components are react in different clothing. You don’t need this component-based framework style architecture to write applications for the browser.

I promise writing applications for the browsers is not challenging. You don’t need big frameworks or component madness that’s more of the same.

Curious if has anyone had much success using web components within a react UI library? When building a component library on a bespoke design system, I'm quite pleased that I can rely on a headless library like RAC to ensure that the base component implementation is accessible and works well on touch devices. I can see theoretically that web components could be a complimentary tool, but in practice I'm not certain where they're best used.

Agreed, Web Components don't require any framework and you can achieve everything you can achieve with React (including reactivity via attributeChangedCallback), the learning curve for Web Components is actually much less steep than React when you consider from the perspective of someone starting from scratch.

Furthermore, Web Components enforce good patterns; like the fact that you can only pass strings as attributes (by-value) is actually genius as it encourages simple, minimalist component interfaces and avoids pass-by-reference issues for which React community had to invent an entirely new paradigm to protect against (I.e. Redux state management with functional programming approach).

And the great irony is that a lot of the top people who are still pushing React are basically rich from Facebook shares and don't have to work anymore. In effect many of them are forcing this technology onto young people who have no choice in the matter whilst they themselves don't need to use it or do any coding anymore. Meanwhile I know a lot of developers who want to leave (or have left) the industry because of how bad it is and how few decisions they're allowed to make.

It's demoralizing to work with inferior tools when you know better tools exist because you use them in side projects... When you see this, you think to yourself "If the company forces me to be inefficient with my choice of tooling, this gives me a license to be inefficient in other ways."

Personally, I don't even code anymore (only on my side projects). It's a shame because one of my main talents is writing clean, minimalist code. In my day job, I'm using drag-and-drop UI platforms like n8n and Flowise (for AI). It's refreshing to be able to use vanilla JS inside the nodes, without a compile step and on a real-world project that actually pays. These UI platforms are actually much more predictable to work with than React. When I was using React (for almost a decade), I was constantly debugging weird glitches and state management issues; I never encountered those with Web Components or with platforms like n8n.

I moved my entire business off React and now I don’t have to worry about tinkerers at Meta deciding to reinvent React every 2 years and tricking everyone by keeping the name again and again.

Web components are fantastic. They are the real future.

>"While a lot of people view web components as competitors to frameworks, they don't really have to be. The just define an interface between component implementations and browsers so enable interop and reliable composition."

I avoid frameworks like a plague. Plain JS, web components and some good domain specific libs are more than enough to cover all my needs