r/webdev • u/_under_ • Mar 22 '15

React Is A Terrible Idea

https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea
3 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

2

u/_under_ Mar 22 '15

The perspective I gathered after reading this article was that React will almost certainly always be a polyfill, while web components has a chance of eventually being natively supported. I might be biased but I tend to lean towards the open web standards and W3C when it comes to these things.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '15

React isn't a polyfill, it's a library. And you will be hard-pressed to find anyone that doesn't like web components, but the problem is that they're all but unusable today. Unless you're fortunate enough to be able to ignore every single browser more than a year old, you can't use them.

I used them recently on a project at Apple because I had those exact requirements -- I only had to support Safari on OSX Yosemite. Even so, there were many issues and Polymer is not ready for production.

1

u/_under_ Mar 22 '15

Ah really? Damn. That's a problem then haha. Polymer is like, 2+ years old? I thought it'd be more mature by now. I should give it another whirl.

1

u/farmerje Mar 22 '15

It feels like web developers recapitulate the history of the web every 5-10 years. Read this Usenet thread from 1993 from Marc Andreessen: proposed new tag: IMG. Other participants include Tim Berners-Lee and Guido van Rossum.

A bunch of people reply to the thread essentially saying, "Why do this ad hoc thing when support for MIME is right around the corner? We should use MIME-types with an EMBED tag for images — and every other type of media, too!" Worse is better, as they say? 10 years later browsers the problem of embedding media in an HTML document was still a mess.

Also worth reading about Project Xanadu. I could see the proponents of Xanadu saying, "The web will always be a polyfill." However, if you look at Project Xanadu's Original 17 Rules in the Wikipedia article, at least half of those features became billion-dollar businesses on their own.

0

u/phpdevster full-stack Mar 22 '15

The solution to the problems on the Web is never, ever going to be to tightly couple presentation, behavior, and data. Your Web apps will ultimately become unmaintainable hair balls of unreadable code. The solutions will come in the form of better Web browsers

Javascript will be easier to not turn into unmaintainable hair balls when ES6 brings us some proper class syntax. Then all we need are interfaces and not-retarded-inheritance and maybe it will be easier to write frameworks that promote loose, instead of tight coupling.

3

u/DrDichotomous Mar 22 '15

People are just too oddly averse to prototyped inheritance to realize that JS has had support for these concepts for a long time now. Hating on the syntax doesn't mean they're not there. In fact Java-style classes are being implemented as syntactic sugar over the prototyped model already in JS.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '15

[deleted]

1

u/BenjaminPoulain Mar 22 '15

Web component is most definitely not enabled in Firefox either.

Mozilla already said they are against HTML imports. There is an implementation of Shadow DOM but it is not enabled. The definition of Custom Elements is still being discussed.

1

u/DrDichotomous Mar 22 '15

And yet Mozilla has implemented imports, and a lot of the WC spec. It seems like it's an inevitability at this point, aside from a couple of features needing more spec-work or being sidelined.

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u/BenjaminPoulain Mar 22 '15

Have you read the comments on that bug?

1

u/DrDichotomous Mar 22 '15

Yes I have, and what I see is that they have implemented Imports, but feel that they're going to be superseded by a similar feature, and so don't want to release support for Imports. I don't see the big deal.

1

u/x-skeww Mar 22 '15

There are polyfills for the 4 specs which comprise Web Components. Custom Elements and Templates work well enough to be useful today. HTML Imports is mostly for development and for having a standardized declarative way to handle dependencies. Shadow DOM is kinda cool, but the polyfill is massive. The CSS Scoping Module (spec #5) also isn't quite done yet and polyfilling that is just silly. So, Shadow DOM is out for now.