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The nice thing is that if you're using a library like Lit or Svelte, you won't have to bother with the web component API much at all. https://svelte.dev/docs/custom-elements-api https://lit.dev/
The React API is slightly nicer to use, especially with JSX.
[1]: https://github.com/andrewmcwatters/custom-elements
The main reason is that they're too low-level to use directly.
They do a lot, but stop just short of being useful without something of a framework on top. I tried hard to use them directly, but found that it was untenable without sensible template interpolation, and without helpers for event binding.
Here's my shot at the smallest possible "framework" atop Web Components that make them workable (and even enjoyable) as an application developer:
https://github.com/dchester/yhtml
It's just ~10 SLOC, admittedly dense, but which make a world of difference in terms of usability. With that in place, now you can write markup in a style not too dissimilar from React or Vue, like...
${this.count}
Examples like this bug me. The React example is using a high level abstraction, the web component is directly using the API. A more accurate example would show how those React calls eventually boil down to document.createElement()
I don’t think the Web Components API was meant to be used directly all the time. You can use a framework like StencilJS:
https://stenciljs.com/
Now, every time we read `offsetHeight`, the browser sees that it has a scheduled DOM modification to apply, so it has to apply that first, before it can return a correct value.
This is the reason that libraries like fastdom (https://github.com/wilsonpage/fastdom) exist - they help ensure that, in a given tick, all the reads happen first, followed by all the writes.
That said, I suspect even if you add a write followed by a read to your `while(1)` experiment, it still won't actually render anything, because painting is a separate phase of the rendering process, which always happens asynchronously. But that might not be true, and I'm on mobile and can't test it myself.
* Should not conflict with anything on the page
[0] https://github.com/sneas/img-comparison-slider
Things like HTML (and JSON) imports in ES modules, among other things, have been waiting on some safety signalling mechanics currently named "Import Attributes". Import Attributes are currently in Stage 3 [0].
The basic security story is that browsers never care about file extensions, they care about MIME types. A developer might add an import to a third-party HTML or JSON file somewhere and expect one "safe" behavior, but the third-party could just return a MIME type of "text/javascript" and inject an entire script and the browser is supposed to respect that MIME type.
To keep things safe, browsers want a way to signal that an import is supposed to JSON (or HTML or CSS) rather than JS and error if it gets back something "wrong" from a server request. That's one of the proposed uses for Import Attributes to suggest expected MIME types for non-JS modules in ES module imports.
Unfortunately, there are other proposed uses for Import Attributes (things like including hashes for integrity checks) and so there have been quite a few revisions (and multiple names) for Import Attributes trying to best support as many of the proposed uses as possible, and that has slowed progress on it a lot more than some people would wish.
[0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-import-attributes
React supports Web Components, just some quirks to be aware of: https://custom-elements-everywhere.com/