[Local References In <link> Tags] Explainer introduction section misstates current styling preferences of elements

[justinfagnani]

The explainer includes this section in the introduction:

The current preferred approach for styling elements under a Shadow DOM is through <link> tags, but these tags have several downsides, namely that they must be an external file or a dataURI. The performance of an external file and developer ergonomics of generating a dataURI make both of these options difficult to use. Because of that, developers using Custom Elements have expressed strong interest in addressing these issues.

I think this is pretty inaccurate. I believe the vast majority of elements in the wild use adoptedStyleSheets to style their shadow roots. <link> tags are impractical for most reusable components because they do not control the URL space that the link's href would point into - that's an app concern.

Any cross-shadow style sharing proposal that doesn't work for adoptedStyleSheets will also be as impractical.

I wonder where the claim that the current preferred approach is <link> tags comes from? Was there any survey of elements to back this up? I know of many web components projects and can't remember seeing a link tag used in that way. If you kept this section, could you point to any real world examples?

I think the section would be more accurately stated something like:

The current preferred approach for styling elements under a Shadow DOM is through adoptedStyleSheets, but adoptedStyleSheets do not have a serialized form in HTML. Because of that, developers using Custom Elements have expressed strong interest in addressing these issues.