
The broken promise of Web Components (2017) - vanburen
https://dmitriid.com/blog/2017/03/the-broken-promise-of-web-components/
======
exikyut
I have a working-theory-slash-rant as to why things are the way they are. Some
may disagree - it's a bit left-of-center - and I accept downvotes, but hear me
out.

The mess everything's in is because things are working as designed. I think
the State of The Web™ is actually a working psyop primarily on Google's part
to make everything as complicated as possible in order to enforce their
agenda.

Google introduced a browser to get a position on Web steering committees, then
forked [from] WebKit so they could deepen their agenda down to the technical
levels of the stack and simply sidestep the committees by throwing resources
at what they want to actually be developed.

I learned (from an old novel) about the lawyer-training industry concept of
"sweat files", contrived fictions built up over years that are
indistinguishable from real client files and are solely for the purpose of
exhausting and testing a lawyer's metal. I don't think that's happening
directly with the Web, but I think something similar _might_ : what if, some
of the "web technologies" that are out there, are simply to create noise?

I'm not talking about noise for noise's sake, or conflating the thousand and
one JavaScript frameworks developers build To Save The World© with Google's
high-level agenda. But I do think it's a very interesting thought experiment
to suggest/wonder/ponder that maybe that noise - so easily attributed to
people learning - is the result of a deliberate social psyop within the Web
steering industry (I consider it an industry).

The Web steering committees seems to be extremely weak in terms of strength of
social structure. What I mean is that their defaults seem to be stagnation,
bureaucracy, slow development, arguing about minutiae and trivia instead of
analysis, dividing and conquering and commitment to measurable rapid high-
level/real-world progress. The way I poorly express it it to say that these
groups' instinct seems to be travel ever inward (zooming in on the details)
instead of defaulting to traveling forward.

This situation seems ripe for social exploitation :(

I wrote a couple more comments on these lines a few days ago. Unfortunately
there's no way I can link to the reply chain (hiding messages outside the
chain) like you can on reddit :(

\- Top of reply chain (all context, 20 pages of unrelated text :/):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176032)

\- More focused, but less useful context:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176299)

\- Just my comments, no context:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192992)

~~~
ThJ
From what I've seen, it's not the W3C that drives standards forward. It's
browser vendor developer teams emailing each other.

~~~
exikyut
Yup. The W3C just stands around chasing after everyone and claiming the
credit. :(

Which only stands to make everything that much more trivially socially
engineerable, IMHO...

