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Comment by iteratethis | Hacker News Reader

Surely every single web architecture ultimately renders HTML elements, that wasn't the point.

The point is that the flavor "HTML Web Component" does not rely on JS to start rendering, unlike React.

I believe Flutter doesn't (or didn't use to) - it rendered to canvas, and then in parallel built a hidden DOM structure so an accessibility tree could be derived and made available to screen readers.

You’re right for the large majority of cases, but there are exceptions. These days some use canvas or WebGL, in the past some have used Flash or Java Applets/Swing.

A popular app that some web developers here may use day-to-day recently is Figma, which uses WebGL for rendering.

Where does the data come from, if not JS? How then do HTML Web Components start rendering, without data?

The data would come as part of the server response in most cases.

A variation could be the rendering of a partial UI whilst you then fetch data client-side. Even in this case the web component has the advantage as no JS is needed to render the initial UI.

As long as you're not shoving everything into the shadow dom, then you've got a fallback HTML element that can render before JS is read (and even if the JS is completely broken)...

<special-image>

  <img src="/example.png" />

</special-image>

This image will render before the JS is executed, so you've got no blockers and a perfectly fine fallback, then with the web component you enhance your image with whatever JS you want.

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