Published on: 2020-02-21
In recent years, the web development ecosystem became dominated by frontend frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular. These libraries introduced powerful abstractions and developer-friendly workflows, but they also came with tradeoffs—namely, tight coupling to specific stacks, inconsistent standards, and rising bundle complexity.
Then came a subtle shift. As projects matured and more developers built for scale, interest in framework-agnostic solutions began to re-emerge. At the center of this shift: Web Components.
🛠️ What Are Web Components?
Web Components are a set of native browser APIs that enable developers to create reusable, encapsulated, and declarative custom elements—without relying on a frontend framework.
They consist of four main specs:
- Custom Elements – Define new HTML tags.
- Shadow DOM – Encapsulate styles and markup.
- HTML Templates – Reusable chunks of markup.
- ES Modules – For modular JavaScript loading.
These technologies are supported in all modern browsers and don’t require any build step to get started.
🔄 Why They’re Making a Comeback
Several forces this year pushed developers to reconsider Web Components:
🏗️ Framework Fatigue
Maintaining projects across multiple frameworks became painful—especially in large organizations. Teams needed a way to build UI that worked everywhere, not just inside React or Vue.
🧪 Design Systems Go Cross-Platform
Design systems needed to be portable across marketing sites, dashboards, and SPAs. Web Components offered a single source of UI truth—consumable in any stack.
📦 Shipping Less JavaScript
Web Components work natively in browsers. That means no runtime overhead, smaller bundles, and more control over performance.
🤝 Interoperability Becomes a Priority
Modern enterprise apps often mix stacks. A Web Component built in one repo can be consumed in another without framework entanglement—perfect for micro frontends or widget-based SaaS products.
🧰 Tools and Libraries Supporting the Shift
Several libraries made Web Components more approachable this year:
- Stencil – A compiler that generates Web Components with DX similar to React.
- LitElement / Lit – Lightweight utilities for writing fast, declarative Web Components.
- Shoelace – A collection of framework-agnostic, styled Web Components.
These tools brought ergonomics, type safety, and community conventions to a native API once known for being verbose and complex.
⚠️ Considerations
Despite the growing interest, Web Components aren’t a perfect fit for all projects. Some challenges include:
- Complex state management compared to React-like reactivity.
- Inconsistent support for SSR and hydration.
- Slightly steeper learning curve when integrating with certain tooling (like Redux or Vuex).
That said, many of these concerns are being addressed with hybrid solutions and better documentation.
Summary 📌
- Web Components re-emerged in relevance as teams looked for decoupled, portable, and future-proof UI solutions.
- They offer native performance, encapsulation, and framework interoperability.
- Tools like Stencil, Lit, and Shoelace made adoption more accessible.
- Ideal for design systems, micro frontends, and long-lived platform teams.
- Not always a replacement—but increasingly a complement to traditional frameworks.