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troupoyesterday at 7:42 AM2 repliesview on HN

> It’s worth noting this was written by

by one of the people wrecklessly barging forward with half-baked specs that introduced significantly more problems than they solved, pushed a "solution" that requires 20+ new web specs to barely do all the things user-space is already doing while completely ignoring and gaslighting anyone who wasn't 100% on board with what they were doing.

Safari argued that there should be a declarative ways for this 15 years ago


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gwdyesterday at 11:48 AM

> wrecklessly

<pedantic>

It's "recklessly". "reck" is a very old word meaning "to care, heed, have a mind, be concerned about"; so "reckless" means "without taking heed".

I actually thought it was directly related to "reckon" (meaning "to think or calculate"), but when I looked it up it turned out not to be the case (except much further back in the etymological tree).

</pedantic>

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JimDabellyesterday at 10:37 AM

Web components were such a big disappointment. 200% the complexity for 20% of the functionality. Everything coming out of that area seems to be hideously over-engineered while failing to solve the problems people wanted them to.

My feeling is that they were focused on designing something that is aimed at building form controls, not the kinds of components web developers use in practice. They are designed to make browser vendors’ lives easier, not web developers. That’s often excused with “web components excel at ‘leaf‘ components” when what is actually meant is “web components are bad at everything else”.

I would expect an actually good solution that fits in with the web’s architecture to come from the direction of HTMX, not web components.

> Safari argued that there should be a declarative ways for this 15 years ago

True, but they were equally able to propose and deploy alternative solutions and mostly just went along with web components (with exceptions of course).

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