Hmm it seems HN lost my reply. Odd. Anyway...
> The gold standard also ensures accessibility (the responsibility for accessibility is transferred from browser maker to developer). I suspect many developers, even Google in some of their examples, will forget to add it or think it doesn't apply to them/their app, I find this a huge concern (the web until now embraced accessibility as a universal value).
So there are a few things to keep in mind about the gold standard. First, it's not entirely accessibility related and I would argue it's mostly a best-practices check-list. When you look through the gold standard I would say a large majority of the items are things you need to take care of regardless if you're creating a web component, a simple composite of HTML tags, an angular directive, ember component, jQuery plug-in or even an opensocial widget. For instances you always need to be mindful of your dependencies, load order and local side affects when giving anything to the general public that you hope to be used.
Yes there are a handful of things that you need to do to make web components behave a little nicer in web browsers as far as accessibility goes but the majority of those items need to be applied regardless of how you break up your code so this argument isn't very interesting or useful, in my opinion.
Second, depending on your use case you may not even care about many of those items. Sure in an ideal world we would all care about every item no matter what but the truth is if you're developing components to simply organize your code in a small web app or just for your organization you may not care at all about side affects or dependencies and I think that's fair; not everything needs to stand up to the rigor of something being related for the general populous to use.
I will agree that Google does not always follow their own guidelines with this type of thing, however.
> Web Components are not ‘just’ composites of plain old HTML, some styling and JavaScript, they require tooling and polyfilling (and some polyfilling will make apps slow for users that don't have the latest tech). This is potentially bad for new people in the industry (have to learn many tools before they can get started), and bad for users (as their device might be toos low).
Actually web components are just composites of plain old HTML, styling and JavaScript. They do not require any specific tooling (in fact the only tooling I've seen or used for web components is Polymer's vulcanize and it's absolutely terrible; I've never seen it work correctly on the first shot) and they only require polyfills if you want to use them in non-evergreen browsers (Firefox and Chrome mostly support what you need today). Regardless of the technicalities I do agree that web components can be slow and it's one of my gripes about them though I really don't know what tools you're talking about being required to start.