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Discussion on: Why the React community is missing the point about Web Components

 
thesdev profile image
Samir Saeedi

@benny you have to use a toolchain or a bundler for a real production web app at the end of the day. Even Google (the big force behind WCs) suggests using them: youtu.be/mIWCLOftfRw?t=690

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

No you don't need a toolchain. That's the whole point. You shouldn't need one. You may add one as an optimization (which is what Google is suggesting there) and I do as well in some of my apps. But you shouldn't need one. You should be able to serve files that you edited yourself directly and they should just work in the browser. That's the web I grew up with and that's the web I want to show to my kids in a few years time.

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dan_abramov profile image
Dan Abramov • Edited

You can do that just fine with React. There are people who don't like JSX and they write vanilla JS, e.g. github.com/Jador/react-hyperscript....

And again, even adding JSX doesn't mean adding a whole a toolchain. JSX compiler is like a SASS compiler — one command to run a watcher which outputs files to another folder. No complex build systems.

It's irresponsible (to the users!) to ship code to production without a minifier. So you probably already have a build step if you care about your users. Why not put a JSX command before it?

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦
var h = require('react-hyperscript');
var React = require('react');

var AnotherComponent = require('./another-component');

module.exports = React.createClass({
  render: function render() {
    return (
      h('div.example', [
        h('h1#heading', 'This is hyperscript'),
        h('h2', 'creating React.js markup'),
        h(AnotherComponent, {foo: 'bar'}, [
          h('li', [
            h('a', {href: 'http://whatever.com'}, 'One list item')
          ]),
          h('li', 'Another list item')
        ])
      ])
    );
  }
});
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import { html, render } from 'https://unpkg.com/lit-html/lit-html.js?module';
import './another-component.js';
const tpl = html`
  <div class="example">
    <h1 id="heading">This is lit-html</h1>
    <h2>Creating HTML Markup</h2>
    <another-component foo="bar">
      <li>
        <a href="http://whatever.com">One List Item</a>
      </li>
      <li>Another List Item</li>
    </another-component>
  </div>
` 
render(tpl, container)
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🤷‍♂️

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dmitriid profile image
Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt

The difference is obvious, isn't it? One is just JS functions. You can refactor them. Lint them. Runs code analysis tools on them. Split them out. Move to a different module.

The other one is a string blob.

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

You have fun with that... I'll be writing HTML

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dmitriid profile image
Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt

It's not HTML though. It's a string blob inside Javascript code. You can wish it away, but the reality remains.

🤷‍♂️

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thesdev profile image
Samir Saeedi

If your problem is tooling then maybe this extension can help. Does it have to say .html on the file extension to be more than a "string blob"? HTML is text after all, it's literally in the name.

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dmitriid profile image
Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt

That extension doesn't negate the fact that it remains a string blob inside Javascript. Having a string inside a programming language and calling it something else doesn't make it something else.

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thesdev profile image
Samir Saeedi

I wonder how do you feel about writing inside <script> and <style> tags in HTML. In which ways <script> alert("hi") </script> differs from template.innerHTML = "<div> hi </div>"? (Provided that there's tooling support and that the browser knows it has to parse the latter string as HTML not JavaScript.)

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dmitriid profile image
Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt

I wonder if people actually know what tagged literals are in JS.

Hint:

html`string`
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is nothing more than a single function call with, you guessed it, a string

html('string', ...)
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No amount of word twisting and wishful thinking can change that. I really advise you to look at what lit-html does such as diligently parsing this string looking for tags and markers: github.com/Polymer/lit-html/blob/m...

And no. the browser does not know how to "parse this string as HTML". Because it's just a string, it's handled as a string, and is used a string, and nothing else.

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progrium profile image
Jeff Lindsay

Unsubscribe

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oenonono profile image
Junk • Edited

You all realize that JavaScript is just a string in a file without an engine to parse, compile, and execute it, right?

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bennypowers profile image
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

Well, it's a drop more complicated than that. Tagged template literals know about their static and dynamic parts. And lit-html uses template tags and weakmaps for fast parsing and efficient storage.

 
thepassle profile image
Pascal Schilp

Im fine with it being string blobs, string parsing is much faster than html parsing.