logoalt Hacker News

loftiestoday at 4:36 AM3 repliesview on HN

I used custom elements extensively in 2014 when support was not as widespread. I think it's a beautiful, elegant solution and I'm still a little bit bitter that React became as big as it was. Now everything "has" to be a SPA because developers want to use React, whereas most users would actually be better served with good 'ol HTML with some custom elements where needed.


Replies

toastaltoday at 9:02 AM

> Now everything "has" to be a SPA because developers want to use React

Have you followed anything in the last 5 years? Outside of bootcamp students, this has been on the decline for a while… in some cases overcorrecting for where a SPA might make more sense.

troupotoday at 12:38 PM

> I think it's a beautiful, elegant solution

Very confused by statements like these.

They are extremely verbose.

They are too high level, preventing many low-level optimizations.

They are too low-level, preventing you from using/implementing them without going into the details of how they actually work.

They break many platform assumptions and conventions, creating no end of problems both for end users and implementers, and needing dozens of new specifications to fix glaring holes that exist only because web components exist. All of those specs? A heavy dousing of Javascript of course.

Even the people who push them heavily cannot agree on what they are good is and what the goal of them is

show 1 reply
teaearlgraycoldtoday at 4:47 AM

I’ve been getting into SSR with JSX as a template engine using kita. You still get full typescript analysis and composability. It beats any other SSR web templating system I’ve used.

I agree the need for everything to be a react app by default has gotten out of control. But I think if you’re a startup with unknown future needs it’s hard to ignore the flexibility and power of something like react. If you know you’re just making a CRUD app and good old fashioned form POSTs will do then it’s beautiful to have that speed and the lightweight pages.

show 1 reply