I think it’s a fair point that “use the platform” originally came out of Chrome DevRel (at least, that’s where I first heard it). But I can’t recall any other browser vendors taking exception with it, and I imagine that the non-Google engineers working at the CSS Working Group would be delighted if more web devs used their stuff!

One of the reasons I didn’t get into web components is that they’re a very touchy subject and not an obvious slam-dunk win like “replace 100 lines of JS with 1 line of CSS.” Also keep in mind that nobody (or very few) people in the web components space ever expected web components to replace frameworks entirely – there’s a reason that Lit, Fast, LWC, etc. are built on top of web components. So some of the “use the platform” marketing there was directed at framework authors themselves (React, Solid, Svelte, etc.), who I think had very reasonable gripes with the limitations of web components (SSR, accessibility, etc.). Anyway I had two entire posts on the topic, so no need to rehash it here. 😆

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It’s a good point, yeah. I think in my “dialog” example a common case would be that the JS developer builds something that works well enough for sighted mouse users and then completely ignores all the stuff you’re supposed to do for keyboard or screenreader users.

I think some of it also comes from React component libraries not having the proper affordances/idioms to easily swap in a link for a button or vice versa. So you reach for a button to do a link’s job and then break a bunch of stuff like right-click, middle-click, etc.

OTOH I’ve also seen cases where the React library did have the proper idioms, and the problem is that the developer didn’t know to use them! For example at my work we use Chakra UI which I’ve found has excellent accessibility, but only if you use it exactly as documented. (Arguably this is another case of “not understanding the platform.”)

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