Web Components After 10 Years: The Design System and UI Builder I've Always Wanted

This video is a reflection on more than a decade of working with Web Components, starting long before modern frameworks took over.

It began with HTML and CSS snippets, back when jQuery was everywhere. Buttons, form elements, accordions, transformicons, and other small experiments lived in loose files I carried around. I cared about performance early, so I avoided piling on plugins and abstractions.

When Web Components emerged, I finally pulled those snippets together, turning the styles and HTML into self-contained, reusable components.

In 2015, I first encountered React. It was powerful and productive, but it raised a question that stuck with me. If React is great today, what does the longer term future of the web look like?

For years, my exploration never became more than a small set of encapsulated components.

AI changed that. It helped turn a long-running playground into a coherent component system that closely matches my ideal design system. It is not perfect, but it’s the closest thing to right I have ever worked on.

Almost by accident, that component system became the foundation for a UI builder I’m creating, bringing the same ideas to life in a new way.

#webcomponents
#designsystems
#frontend
#uiarchitecture
#webperformance
#javascript
#css
#html
#uidesign
#aitools