Hi i am search for good and complete Web Components library, and even there are some good out there, theres no one that is most complete than Ionic UI Components, even tho the Ionic components have the behavior for both iOS and Android UI Style.
Once the Ionic Components are made with Stencil, and therefore are agnostic and made with web components, its for sure can be use as a UI components.
I’de like to know if theres a way of use only the UI components, or if theres a wayt to install only then.
Or if the UI components can have some strange behavior when used outside of a mobile app.
I know that some of you may answear things like “but ionic is a mobile project”, “but theres other components”, “why would you use that”, i and i appreaciate the concerne, but my point here is:
Ionic UI Components are the most complete one, and for be that it had solve problems in a better way then the others, also its asure that works with frameworks perfectly. And once its build with web components, it sure works on the web, but there’s in fact a problem of using then only on web?
Actually, these opinions “but ionic is a mobile project”, “but theres other components”, “why would you use that” are only true for the older version of Ionic (version 1~3).
Since Ionic version 4+ released (January 2019), the Ionic Framework is decoupled from the mobile apps. So it’s totally OK if we want to using the Ionic UI components to only build a website.
In my experience, this approach is mostly smooth for developing a website. But nothing is perfect, Ionic Framework do have some weaknesses and issues:
1. On mobile web, address bar won’t hide when scrolling down:
This is a long-time, well-known issue. It has some progress in the past, but the result is not perfect so the PR did not get merged.
2. No legacy browser support (e.g. IE)
3. No native Server Side Render (SSR) support
Because SSR do not know how to render Web Components, it is very tricky if we need SSR. There are tons of workarounds/hacks can be found on the internet, but in my opinion, it’s not worth it to speed too much time on this.
These are the top 3 for me.
Other than these pain points, I really enjoy building website using Ionic UI Components
To answer your question, yes, you can totally use it as a web UI for a web app that is for desktop viewing. We are actually building a web portal with Ionic UI and find it really nice to be honest. We will probably have to use other repos to fill in for other things like image editor such but it does a nice job even in web/desktop viewing. Nowadays every website is built with mobile first design/development in mind so I think it fits the bill.
Good point. I wish Ionic had a separate UI component library project for the web since it would be the best option to fill the gap for the need of a mobile-friendly library. There are lots of libraries out there, but none are as good as Ionic when it comes to mobile and PWA. My biggest concern with using Ionic within my project would be future support. For example, if I use Material in my Angular project, I’m pretty sure I won’t face serious problems when I update my Angular version. Ionic, on the other hand, won’t guarantee anything since it’s not supposed to be a web UI component library. I hope the Ionic team decides to launch a separate project.
