If you're wondering what that looks like, people post pictures of them found in the wild on Reddit:
from <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Desire_path&oldid...>
In what way?
After doing this for more than 20 years I have asked that question hundreds of times and the answer is almost always about aesthetics, about 95%+. Of those aesthetics based conclusions most people cannot find their own way to handle it without waiting for somebody else to write a tool that provides the answer they were looking for. Even then the answer tends to be predicated on social acceptance more than technical evaluation. That is a training or human performance problem more than a technical problem. It says a lot about an industry where the people who are able to ask these kinds of questions realize its a training problem and are willing to raise salaries and assume tech debt as opposed to fixing a human capital problem for far less money.
At any rate there is something to be said for the developer who builds things on their own just for themselves. In many cases the result is faster, lighter, and more capable software than what they are paid to do for their employer. Their personal software isn't locked into conventions or abstractions beyond their control.
WCs have tons of boilerplate to them, such as extra song and dance to make attributes observable. In fact, a custom element can have an attribute and a property with the same name, and they are managed separately unless you explicitly set them up to sync. It's a terrible design.
Built-in things aren't extensible - there's no way to have a number type input that doesn't suck without doing it yourself, and then you need to opt into extra song and dance for your element to participate in form submission data.
There's a reason popular frameworks are popular. They're good enough, you can hire people who already know them, and you benefit from the maintainers fixing bugs for you.
I like modules. They exist in some form or another in most programming languages and they are one of the few definitively good ideas in software engineering. Give me the ability to split off parts of my work with some public API and hidden internals. Works on different levels too, like with a reusable library that consists of modules.
JS has a module story. But HTML and CSS just aren't connected to it, without using something like JSX.
That's why I end up abandoning "using the platform" every time.
I dont know any other environment except the browser where code is split into three in a similar way.
The argument presented in the article here is that libraries like jQuery and React were useful, but now the browser has better APIs, so we should use them.
The browser indeed has a components API, but it is by the admission of many, fairly low-level as far as component APIs go. It doesn't really solve how to manage data flow or rendering in your components or application, and has many sore spots.
No problem. There is a pretty nice library called LitElement that provides solutions to some of these problems.
But then we're not really living off the land are we? We still need Lit in this case.
So what's wrong with WebComponents? Frankly, I think this is a bad question. A better question is why people think WebComponents competes with React to begin with. WebComponents intentionally fails to solve some of the most annoying problems with writing components because it is intended to be low-level and used by libraries like Polymer. Because of this, it leaves many problems open-ended. Like for example. WebComponents act like HTML elements. Cool? So you can pass data down using HTML attributes. Neat. Problem: HTML attributes are strings. Okay... So you either need to serialize everything to strings, or you have to pass objects through a separate side channel (usually properties that you assign separately.) In fact, generally speaking, writing WebComponents that compose other WebComponents is ass. I'm pretty sure it has been noted before that WebComponents works best for leaf components... So it would certainly not make a good replacement for a library like React, which is meant to be a substrate you can build large scale applications out of.
For me its all about design freedom and maximum flexibility. To achieve that I go further down the stack, as low as the given platform allows. I have been doing this work for a very long time, so I am not worried about risks with operating in the browser as primitive as possible. The most important APIs and conventions have not changed much, at least for me, since the release of DOM4 spec and the JSON methods entered JavaScript as language methods, then later WebSockets.
When you go lower elsewhere, the risks are higher given there is so much we otherwise take for granted. There are risks to reinventing the wheel on some of the most complex things we use but don't really think about. The benefits, though, are massive if you can create capabilities the technologies allow but nobody else has. Achieving this is more common than it sounds like it should be, only because most people don't try.
My original motivation for reinventing wheels, early in my career, was to have streamlined processes at work so that I could spend lest time doing work assignments and more time browsing the web. Now, I am about to do my first start up so now my motivation is to kneecap the incumbents with a cheaper and more durable technology that allows for writing future tools upon it to scale in ways the competition cannot.
It's not overly ambitious to have rich text input fields or a sortable table. If you can have a half assed xpath implementation you can have a shopping cart and a product.
Someone knowledgable once ran off with a fumble of mine acting like I pulled gold from thin air.
It took the id's from the page, created strings with the same name containing the inner html, made a copy, compared the copy with the string every 50ms, if they were no longer the same the dom node and the copy were updated with the new value. Input fields compared the copy with the input value as well.
So you could do:<div id="myname">my name <div>
Then do myname += "John";
Or <div id="a">42<div><input id="b" value="123">
Then do a = a * b / 2
State management.
I have to track what items I want to remove, hide, show, alter, etc. in each handler.
That is a cumbersome mental model, which is why React, Angular, Vue, Svelte and every other web framework calculate that automatically for you.
To be clear: I don't necessarily begrudge the mutation APIs; but there's no way I'm going to use them directly for anything except very simple things.
I think this point is what the anti-framework does not get when discussing the topic. They fail to see how hard and unpleasant it is to handle all the real-world problems that hits any production environment with a "platform" approach, and at the same time they fail to see how javascript-based een frameworks not only solve them by making them implementation details but also go through great lengths to improve the developer experience.
Just take a look at JSX. It's where a great deal of the complexity of the framework lies, but simplifies everything so much. It's the exact opposite of platform features.
For starters, you can start by checking https://caniuse.com .
Then, dive down into the concept of polyfills to understand what extra work everyone must go through to normalize the platform.
And then look at the features themselves. Web components is a good example. Theywere developed as a hack to extend toe current platform to catch up with basic features provided by JavaScript web frameworks. Except they are virtually unusable, unless they are made palatable with... JavaScript frameworks.
And lastly, compare that with the experience of just using a mainstream JavaScript framework. Any of them. It's world's of difference. JavaScript frameworks prioritize developer experience to the point they even went through great pains to have a xml-like DSL to make their javascript be seamless. Whereas things like web components go the opposite direction and make their platform's first class feature feel like vanilla javascript.
One way to keep myself honest in being on the desire path was to go from win to win (win = someone using platform and being a satisifed "customer") iteratively as part of the full build. It also helps avoid platform fatigue, and ensures that should some priorities change, we've gotten some value out of the effort.
Unfortunately, the browser is not a Minecraft server. It's a living standard that has to maintain backwards compatibility. The desire path (React, Svelte,...) will always exist. And so will the ridiculous way they tried to stop that.
To expand on that a bit, you can deliberately avoid putting in paths so that the natural behaviour becomes clear. You'll see paths develop between areas that you might not have thought of. Pedestrians are flattening grass and showing connections that are actually useful rather than following lines that have been set out for them with competing priorities in mind like aesthetics or budgets. Then you take that data and create paths that "users" actually want, based on their behaviour / use of the previous system.
“UX Designers” seem to worship at the Jony Ive/Alan Dye altar of minimalism and “airiness” and tell anyone who will listen that every type of user, for every type of task, gets “overwhelmed” if you give them ‘too many choices,’ so instead of natural direct paths that people would have chosen, modern software is more like a series of white rooms with exactly three exits each, and the exits are labeled with an icon when they’re labeled at all (many are impossible to label because they’re swipe gestures), and other exits only appear when you step near them (the hover nonsense).
The hard part is how fitting for the new user and fitting for the experienced user are sort of opposites in interface design. For new or occasional users who will only use the thing a couple times a year, you want a deep design, gently guiding someone unfamiliar with the application through each step in turn, lots of modes/clicks limited information in each. For the experienced user a shallow design is best, information dense, everything in one action, never hide anything. The best designers can sort of navigate this paradox, but for most you have to focus on one and shim the other.
As for design focused design, where the point is how good it looks, well, that sucks for everyone. But it looks good in the ads.
I can relate to this, but React definitely made things more fun for me at least.
Web Components on the other hand seemed to solve a problem that few actually were having, or for those that loathe React & modern frameworks because of bloat or whatever
On my university campus there was a well-trod path across the grass where students would traverse in a beeline from their dorms to the cafeteria during mealtime.
Eventually they did put a walkway there. But for a time the only thing paving it was student footfalls.
WebComponents do their job with little-to-no fuss, and they're universally available.