Comment by Marco Alka on "Are you using Web Components in production?"

I don't use WebComponents in prod, because I never use unfinished specs in prod :)

Well, tbh, I tried to use Polymer (which is a WebComponent Polyfill plus minimal framework plus component ecosystem by Google) for a Cordova application, however the polyfill failed hard on iOS with very opaque errors. Unfortunately, during development, I only had access to browsers and Windows and Android devices, so I only noticed that it fails on iOS shortly before the presentation to a big customer :/ I had to write a workaround using display:none; and a bit of JS, which copies and moves nodes around in the DOM, depending on my needs. I hope to update the workaround later to pure WebComponents, but for now, the workaround is good enough and enables an easy WebComponent-implementation later on (there are not too many components, yet, so it's still very OK)

If it wasn't working on Aug/17 that's weird because now iOS supports web components (with the lite polyfill) so it should work. But I think it is supported since mid '16. Correct me if I'm wrong?

Avichay Eyal there you go: caniuse.com as you can see, the v1 specs are still not entirely available. It's been so long and no one really cares (except for Google) :/

The standard is gaining popularity => all vendors will get there (everybody want's to have chrome marketshare). It's a fact that Safari and FF both support it with developer flags (meaning it's in beta state).
Polyfill exists and is very lightweight (and doesn't reduce much performance) => Can run on all browsers
Standards + Polyfills are no worse than big libraries with alternate implementations. In-fact they are better; Standards based code "plays nice" and inter-op across frameworks and platforms (With the exception of virtual DOMs that doesn't give a damn about anything).
TLDR => Use standards (with polyfills for now) and you still have reduced code size and better developer experience, with the power porting of code across applications, etc.

I published a post about the expensive price we all pay (developers as well as software companies) because of us being held prisoners by library "sandboxes". Read here if you have ~5 minutes.

Avichay Eyal

It's beta (and has been for far too long), so nope for production ;)
In theory you are right, however I have very bad experiences with the polyfill (iOS is a special snow flake :/), so still nope for production
I write 90% (stable) Vanilla Code. Small and specialized solutions in 10min time, no problem. It might not be WebComponents (alike) anymore, but it does get the job done in a similar fashion and is 100% compatible with all browser ;)
WebComponent standards have been around for a very long time, yet they still are not available everywhere. People don't use them. no one cares. In what way is such a black sheep better than stable, accepted and battle-tested features? It's not like I didn't come up with an equally small solution in pure JS to work around missing and badly implemented standards...

While I share your enthusiasm about WebComponents, I have been waiting for their prime time for years now, and to be honest, I am fed up. WebComponents never got the hype they deserved and needed, and even today are severely lacking. I am not a fan of polyfills and I have never had the need for React or similar approaches. Yes, I did some stuff with Polymer, which basically builds on top of the spec and the polyfill. However, it was a fight with many hardships and bugs. I don't want to go back there, until WebComponents landed in all browsers and are starting to be used by major players.

Thanks for your article, though, I will take some time to read it later.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I can understand you as a vanilla developer. But I don't understand why people don't like wc standards. People use plenty of unsupported features with babel, they use scss, they use decorators and hell they even use typescript. But a standard? Are we crazy?

Avichay Eyal Most probably. I like being crazy, though

My library - slim.js - is a web-components authoring library. Basically, it's just a base class with some superpowers. The website is written in slim.js and it works on all browsers. There are users of my library and overall it seems they are satisfied. Also, many google internal applications are written with Polymer. It's a fact that web components work in production. I would say that for B2B applications (long-lifecycle applications) you should definitely use web components for your core UI or core library, then you could migrate between frameworks and survive the frameworks churn every time it happens.

Avichay Eyal

It's a fact that web components work in production.

No, it's a fact, that the polyfill works in some browser configurations. It does not work on older browsers and it does not work on headless applications (screen readers, bots, etc.). Also, for example HTML imports are still only a draft. Even though google has a big influence on internet drafts, things might change and everyone using WebComponents now is going to suffer. That's why it is a bad idea to use them, now. v1 drafts might break your application.

Regarding old browsers: Promise, Destructuring, Class, ES6 syntax, and many other things simply don't work. Webpack adds polyfills and babel do the shims for basic support.

V1 and future versions are backward compatible. You cannot guarantee anything regarding browser vendors and it does not matter which feature we are talking about.

If you wish to support deprecated browsers, well, that's up to you, but analytics says IE10 and down usage is less than 0.5% of overall user-agents.

Avichay EyalTrue that and you are right. WebDev still is a harsh world of standards vs real world. That's why I like stability, which I can only achieve by building on old and proven tech. If possible, I still use ES5 in my client code, which makes me independent of third party stuff and that has always worked best for the regular stuff. I had my share of bad experiences with new tech in customer projects, so I tend to be a bit slower for prod :)

But hey, I really want to use WeComponents, and I probably will use them once HTML includes are in v1 and at least the three base techs are available in the current FF, Chrome and Edge for my smaller projects.

Btw, at the moment, I have to use WebComponents for a bigger project at work. We do use WebPack and polyfills. And they are really hard to work with and it's a fight. So I am still glad that I don't use them for personal and freelancing stuff.

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