Re: [WICG/webcomponents] [templates] Ensure that template instantiation actually improves the platform (#704)

@trusktr 

To quote [Figma](https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/)

> the web wasn’t designed as a general-purpose computing platform. It started off as a technology primarily for documents and had a whole bunch of stuff for application development bolted on top. That stuff usually took the form of specific APIs for one-off cases instead of providing general primitives that can be used to implement all sorts of things. 

To quote [Dan Abramov](https://dev.to/ben/why-the-react-community-is-missing-the-point-about-web-components-1ic3) of Redux and React fame

> React users would love to not have to npm install a date picker and bloat their bundles! If they need to "use the platform" then why doesn't that platform ship the features they actually ask for? Instead of a `<carousel>` they get an `<aside>`. Features like service workers are touted as a solution to many problems in the web, but their ergonomics are so under-designed that people actually have to change domains to bust the cache from a broken build (I’m not making this up).

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We're now in a sitation when web browsers are hellbent on [removing alert/prompt/confirm](https://dev.to/richharris/stay-alert-d) withouy providing any usable replacements. Well, they've now rushed `<dialog>`. Which they argued [should propbably be removed](https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/4184#issuecomment-440405059) from the spec because no one wants to implement it due to a list of issues that no one has solved since

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The whole web component that web browsers have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into has us stranded with:

- cumbersome neither-low-nor-high-level API that even Google's own projects cannot use (AMP switched to using Preact to author them because the API is not conductive to development)
- "this is just html" components that have to have more and more Javascript bolted onto them to fix things like form participation, and in the future acceccibility issues
- are now poisoning all other standards because they now have to make sure those standards play nice with WCs and Shadow DOM (e.g. Scoped CSS which covers ~80% of use cases people use WCs for is now being butchered to accomodate Shadow DOM because of course it is)
- cannot be used with SVGs (that is, WCs cannot appear inside SVGs, see [twit-sized explanation](https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1354165883648827401))

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It looks like literally zero long-term planning for most of the features just dumped into the platform. None whatsoever. 

You want developers like me to stop being "insulting"? Then stop adding things haphazardly with no forethought or planning. As QuirksMode [suggested in 2015](https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/07/stop_pushing_th.html)

> Why should we push the web forward? And forward to what, exactly? Do we want the web to be at whatever we push it forward to? You never hear those questions.
>
> The innovation machine is running at full speed in the wrong direction. We need a break. We need an opportunity to learn to the features we already have responsibly — without tools! Also, we need the time for a fundamental conversation about where we want to push the web forward to. A year-long moratorium on new features would buy us that time.

Instead we get * vaguely gestures at everything *.

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Received on Sunday, 28 August 2022 05:19:13 UTC