community-protocols VS lit

> except that "reactivity" does not meet the bar of developers collectively having landed on a solution to a common problem

Now that everyone seems to be in love with signals, there is work going on in the web components community group to prepare a spec for a signal (or observable, not sure what they are trying to call it) primitive [0]. It seems that they are getting ready to bring it to TC39 as a proposal.

(In the meantime, the Observable primitive from rxjs been given a go-ahead for browser implementation. There is a proposal ready [1], and I think I heard that it may already be in Chrome behind a flag [2].

So yeah; it's gonna be fun. Especially if both groups call their primitive Observable :-)

0 - https://github.com/webcomponents-cg/community-protocols/issu...

1 - https://github.com/WICG/observable

2 - https://nitter.net/BenLesh/status/1737174784406933599

The custom element spec definitely only deals with the mechanics of when are where to run your component's lifecycle code - it says nothing about data. So your choices are basically property accessors, which are interoperable, but require prop-drilling for global-ish data, or something proprietary like a state management library.

The Web Components Community Group (WCCG) is offering something of a third way with the community protocols: https://github.com/webcomponents-cg/community-protocols

The Context protocol provides tree-scoped ambient data in an interoperable way. It's implemented by Lit and FAST (I believe). It doesn't replace a data store, but it's often used to provide data stores to components, and at least reduce some coupling.

Did you know events can also carry promises? A great showcase of this pattern is the Pending Task Protocol by the Web Components Community Group. Now, "Pending Task Protocol" sounds very fancy, but really, it's just an event that carries a promise.

If you’re coming from the Angular world, you probably appreciate the great dependency injection (DI) mechanism they have. You can centrally define some services and reuse them across your app, without thinking about passing on props from component to component - the DI system takes care of it. Lit provides something similar via the [@lit-labs/context](https://lit.dev/docs/data/context/) package. It’s based on the Context Community Protocol and similar to React’s context API.

Fundamentally it is an event based mechanism to access state or "context" from ancestores of a component node. Based on the Web Components Context Protocol RFC which in turn is inspired by React's Context Api, the key purpose is to solve the problem of prop drilling.

The conversation led to the creation of https://github.com/webcomponents-cg/community-protocols. So there is some effort to standardize at least on convention for these higher-order considerations, but working through this and how opinionated it is made me recognize even more that this has a lot of similarities to a different group building a different framework. Tricky balance.

I’m pretty actively following a lot of the web components community so I thought I would jump in here with some hopefully helpful information. Depending on what you mean by SEO it’s worth noting that for a while now Google and I believe Bing and a few others haven’t had any kind of requirement to pre-render content. You can just serve standard web components or any kind of SPA style front end and it will get indexed just fine, no penalties and no real issues unless you’re doing something particularly strange.

However, one of the more exciting projects in the web components space (lit.dev) now also supports proper SSR as well which is a very new thing in the world of web components. They are trying to build it in such a way that any other library can take advantage of through a common interface.

In fact there are some kind of early stage talks happening over here https://github.com/webcomponents/community-protocols where a bunch of companies like Google, Adobe, ING and others are trying to develop some open protocols on a whole bunch of topics to improve interoperability between various libraries so that no one has to buy in 100% to any one setup.

This course focused on Web Components via Lit. I think we spent a single week (two classes) learning the foundations of web development. Never taught us a single line of HTML, told us to google CSS, and spent that first week showing us what JavaScript does. Personally wish we spent some more time understanding the foundations, but even if I don't know exactly what I am doing... I have been able to accomplish some great stuff.

That is the reason why I experiment with the TiniJS framework for a while. It is a collection of tools for developing web/desktop/mobile apps using the native Web Component technology, based on the Lit library. Thank you the Lit team for creating a great tool assists us working with standard Web Component easier.

https://github.com/lit/lit/tree/main/packages/labs/virtualiz...

actually, looking at it (https://lit.dev/), i do exactly that.

I also define a `render()` and extend my own parent, which does a `replaceChildren()` with the render. And, strangely, I also call the processor `html`

I'll still stick with mine however, my 'framework' is half-page of code. I dislike dependencies greatly. I'd need to be saving thousand+ lines at least.

Here, I don't want a build system to make a website; that's mad. So I don't want lit. I want the 5 lines it takes to invoke a dom parser, and the 5 lines it takes do define a webcomp parent.

I rather like https://lit.dev/ for web components so far.

For the reactivity stuff, you might want to read https://frontendmasters.com/blog/vanilla-javascript-reactivi... - it shows a bunch of no-library-required patterns that, while in a number of cases I'd much rather use a library myself, all seems at least -basically- reasonable to me and will probably be far more comprehensible to you than whatever I'd reach for, and frameworks are always much more pleasant to approach after you've already done a bunch of stuff by banging rocks together first.

I work on Lit, which I would hesitate to call a framework, but gives a framework-like DX for building web components, while trying to keep opinions to a minimum and lock-in as low as possible.

It's got reactivity, declarative templates, great performance, SSR, TypeScript support, native CSS encapsulation, context, tasks, and more.

It's used to build Material Design, settings and devtools UIs for Chrome, some UI for Firefox, Reddit, Photoshop Web...

https://lit.dev if you're interested.

I am more a fan of the augmented style because it doesn't entrap you in dev lock-in to platforms.

The problem with frameworks, especially web frameworks, is they reimplement many items that are standard now (shadowdom, components, storage, templating, base libraries, class/async, network/realtime etc).

If you like the component style of other frameworks but want to use Web Components, Google Lit is quite nice.

Google Lit is like a combination of HTML Web Components and React/Vue style components. The great part is it is build on Web Components underneath.

[1] https://lit.dev/

From the comments I see here, it seems like people expect the Webcomponents API to be a complete replacement for a JS framework. The thing is, our frameworks should start making use of modern web APIs, so the frameworks will have to do less themselves, so can be smaller. Lit [0] for example is doing this. Using Lit is very similar to using React. Some things work different, and you have to get used to some web component specific things, but once you get it, I think it's way more pleasant to work with than React. It feels more natural, native, less framework-specific.

For state management, I created LitState [1], a tiny library (really only 258 lines), which integrates nicely with Lit, and which makes state management between multiple components very easy. It's much easier than the Redux/flux workflows found in React.

So my experience with this is that it's much nicer to work with, and that the libraries are way smaller.

[0] https://lit.dev/