Why I built a semantic-HTML first library

I wrote about semantic HTML as interface infrastructure a few weeks ago. The response surprised me. Not because the argument was new. Native elements carrying behaviour for free isn’t a hot take. It surprised me because of how many people replied saying the same thing back to me, unprompted: they were just as frustrated by this as I was. That’s the part I didn’t expect. This isn’t a niche annoyance a handful of us have. A lot of people building interfaces every day are quietly irritated by the same gap, between knowing a button should be a <button> and what actually ends up shipped by Friday. You reach for whatever’s fastest. Right now, fastest usually means a headless library with a div at the bottom of it. So I built Kernel. What it actually is Kernel is a component library. React first, with a Web Components version that carries the same design and the same tokens, so you’re not locked into one framework. Fifty components. Buttons, dialogs, comboboxes, date pickers, data tables,…