I’ve worked with web components for nearly a decade and built various enterprise-scale design systems with them. While I love what they offer on paper, the same pain points keep coming back: Layout shifts, flash of unstyled content, poor server-side rendering support, too much reliance on client side JavaScript, doesn't play well with frameworks like React Server Components, accessibility issues, and so on… Despite all of this, I still think web components are a great foundation for a design system . No other approach gives you true cross-framework portability built on what the web platform already provides. The problem isn’t necessarily the model itself, it’s how we’ve been building them. This is how I ended up creating Elena , a library that I’m open sourcing today. Elena starts from HTML and CSS, and stays grounded in web standards and what the web platform natively provides. What is a Progressive Web Component?…
