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Liskov's Gun: The Parallel Evolution of React and Web Components

Because this essay is over 11 000 words long(!) I’ve made a convenience EPUB file for offline reading. (EPUB only! No PDF this time.) You can download it over on the fulfilment service I use, Lemon Squeezy, with the option to pay what you want if you feel the urge to support my writing.

To make matters worse – and, again, this is based on my impressions at the time and I know plenty of people disagree with me – a few of the more “enthusiastic” Web Components promoters during these three years were parading around being absolute assholes, to an even greater degree than seemed normal in online developer circles. Many of them seemed to outright believe that a set of APIs made unilaterally by a single vendor would inevitably get railroaded unchanged into a standard – in and of itself a highly problematic idea – and talked about web components being “the future”, implying that every other approach, no matter how new, was “legacy” or somesuch. This is arguably normal behaviour in tech, where a dev-rel’s thankless task of building up good vibes about an API or platform can be tanked thoroughly by a lead dev opening their mouth and managing to simultaneously piss everybody off in 140 characters dumped onto the hive of seething malice that used to be called Twitter.

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