How Web Components Are Used at GitHub and Salesforce – The New Stack

How Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With Web Components - The New Stack

“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”

Why were they slow? The answer: React.

“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”

Why We’re Breaking Up with CSS-in-JS | Brad Frost

I’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth many times over my years building on the web. I too feel like there’s something in the air right now, and people are finally acknowledging that most single page apps are crap.

But Brad makes the interesting point that, because they were incubated when profligate client-side JavaScript was all the rage, web components may have ended up inheriting the wrong mindset:

So now the world of web components has egg on its face because the zeitgeist at the time of its design didn’t have such a strong focus on SSR/HTML-first/ progressive enhancement. Had web components been designed in the current zeitgeist, things would almost certainly be different.

Home · castastrophe/wc-theming-standards Wiki

I really like the idea of a shared convention for styling web components with custom properties—feels like BEM meets microformats.

Progressive Enhancement

This post was originally written in 2015, but upon re-reading it today, it still (just about) holds up, so I finally hit publish.

AMP as your web framework – The AMP Blog

The bait’n’switch is laid bare. First, AMP is positioned as a separate format. Then, only AMP pages are allowed ranking in the top stories carousel. Now, let’s pretend none of that ever happened and act as though AMP is just another framework. Oh, and those separate AMP pages that you made? Turns out that was all just “transitional” and you’re supposed to make your entire site in AMP now.

I would genuinely love to know how the Polymer team at Google feel about this pivot. Everything claimed in this blog post about AMP is actually true of Polymer (and other libraries of web components that don’t have the luxury of bribing developers with SEO ranking).

Some alternative facts from the introduction:

AMP isn’t another “channel” or “format” that’s somehow not the web.

Weird …because that’s exactly how it was sold to us (as a direct competitor to similar offerings from Apple and Facebook).

It’s not an SEO thing.

That it outright false. Ask any company actually using AMP why they use it.

It’s not a replacement for HTML.

And yet, the article goes on to try convince you to replace HTML with AMP.