React’s Escape Hatch

February 21, 2022 Engineering/Front-End

  • Being not constraint to a specific domain is one of React's killer features.
  • In React DOM, you can always fall back to creating custom <div> elements with your own styles if something doesn't work.
    • There's a maintainance overhead by doing so but it also unblocks so many use cases.
    • Even at the new Facebook.com, custom containers with with the full fallback to the browser were very common.
  • Every good design systems that I have seen embraces this and allows their users to forward e.g. custom class names to their inner working components.

Other Notes

Engineering/Effective Writing
August 12, 2024
Engineering/Great Engineers
August 4, 2024
June 13, 2024
Engineering/The 50-50 Goal
May 17, 2024
May 2, 2024
April 3, 2024
Engineering/Infrastructure/Deploy Workers Programatically
April 2, 2024
March 7, 2024
Engineering/Feature Flags
February 21, 2024
Engineering/Demo Culture
February 16, 2024
February 1, 2024
Engineering/ML/Embeddings
May 5, 2023
Engineering/ML/Jaccard Similarity
May 4, 2023
May 2, 2023
Engineering/Front-End/Modern Front-End Problems
November 3, 2022
Engineering/Test Matrixes
February 25, 2022
February 25, 2022
Engineering/Front-End/React’s Escape Hatch
February 21, 2022
Other/Notes
January 1, 2022

About the author

Philipp Spiess
Philipp Spiess [ˈʃpiːs]

Engineer at Tailwind Labs.
Prev: Engineer at Sourcegraph and Meta, curator of This Week in React, React DOM team member, and Team Lead at PSPDFKit.