The concept of "components" is borne out of developers wanting to "engineer" the generation of HTML, CSS and JS. Those are the core building blocks of the web.

The concept of "components" is borne out of developers wanting to "engineer" the generation of HTML, CSS and JS. Those are the core building blocks of the web. "Back in my day we used <table> for layout." - Me (Oh the horrors of that) Component driven development goes all the way back to things like Visual Basic development of apps on Windows platforms (like Windows 3.11) or the equivalent on Apple back then. We have taken a document driven technology that was HTML docs linking to other HTML docs and bastardized it into building applications with heavy UX/UI requirements that replaced the VB apps and mainframe green screens of their days. I'm not dissing it, I've spent a career building web apps with it, it just was not the intended use of HTML. There have only been a couple of technologies in the last 25+ years that I remember where components really were a first class citizen and those were when it was not HTML/CSS and it was the browser ceding control to something else like Java Applets or Flash. I haven't paid attention to WASM but I was thinking something similar would come out of that where you could use the web as a delivery platform and ignore HTML/CSS for the most part and leave that for docs. The pendulum is swinging back towards more server-side rendering.