Google announced Material Web Components are entering maintenance mode. Now, what does that mean for you?
MWC Google Announcement
Last month, Google made an announcement on the GitHub repo for Material Web Components. MWC is not being deprecated, but the resources that were being put toward their development and future roadmap are being reassigned to other tasks. They will still be available for use, but they will not be receiving any large updates (internally or from the community). See the announcement linked above for more details.
I think it is important at this point to note the differences in terminology.
Definitions
Material Web Components
Material Web Components: @material/web is a library of web components that uses Material UI. This UI library can be used with any framework on the web, since MWV components are built with vanilla HTML web components.
https://github.com/material-components/material-web & https://m3.material.io/develop/web
Material UI (Material 3)
Material UI: Often called Material 3, this is the latest version of Google’s open-source design system.
Material for Angular (Angular Components)
Material for Angular: This UI component library and tooling (CDK is included in this term) is maintained by the Angular team at Google and the community.
https://material.angular.io/ & https://github.com/angular/components
These are UI components that developers can drop into existing applications with these goals/features:
- Internationalized and accessible so that all users can use them.
- Straightforward APIs that don’t confuse developers.
- Behave as expected across a wide variety of use cases without bugs.
- Behavior is well-tested with both unit and integration tests.
- Customizable within the bounds of the Material Design specification.
- Performance cost is minimized.
- Code is clean and well-documented to serve as an example for Angular developers.
Material CDK
Material CDK: The Component Dev Kit (CDK) is a set of behavior primitives for building UI components and is considered part of “Material for Angular.”
https://material.angular.io/cdk/categories & https://github.com/angular/components/tree/main/src/cdk
This side of Material for Angular is the tooling that helps developers build their own components and includes things like:
- Drag-and-drop: Directives enabling drag-and-drop interactions.
- Layout: Utilities to respond to changes in viewport size.
- Clipboard: Helpers for working with the clipboard.
Conclusion
Now that we have defined these terms, we can talk more easily about what exactly is being put into maintenance mode:
Only Material Web Components that utilized Material UI are being put on pause. The Angular CDK, Material for Angular and the Material UI Design System as a whole are not being affected by this announcement.
But What About the Future of Material for Angular?
The Angular team released a post addressing these changes and concerns within the Angular community. The maintenance mode of MWC should not affect users of Material for Angular (or even Material UI). The Angular team will be making a fork of the components and will continue to develop them as normal.
Happy coding and happy summer, all!