I’ve seen the future, it’s full of HTML.

My feelings precisely:

Web development used to be a lot simpler. If I wanted to test a library or hack together a quick demo, I could just <script src=”some-library”>.

I could reload the page instead of re-compiling a bundle. I could load a static page instead of running a development server.

Our default workflow has been complicated by the needs of large web applications. These applications are important but they aren’t representative of everything we do on the web, and as we complicate these workflows we also complicate educating and on-boarding new web developers.

Some of the web components in the examples are pretty cool. I hope this future really is as near as the author says.

Edit: I dove into web components a bit after seeing this article. They’re pretty cool and it feels good to be “using the platform” of the web. However, I still really love the declarative nature of React vs. the imperative nature of web components. Maybe I’ll write more about this in the future. (Who am I kidding? That post probably isn’t going to happen.)