That&#x27;s because HTML has an abstract declarative way to define the layout&#x2F;drawing whereas Windows did not.<p>But that&#x27;s not especially important when it comes to React in general. The important is that the &quot;how to draw myself&quot; (in a high level) never leaves the view, not whether the &quot;drawing instuctions&quot; happen inside the app (as low level draw commands) or outside (by a mechanism that handles 
composable values representing markup).<p>In both cases the view is a black box -- in that nobody else determines it&#x27;s layout&#x2F;style&#x2F;contents. Whether somebody else or the view itself draws them might reflect a functional vs more imperative style, but it&#x27;s not the key benefit of react.<p>In fact there are React implementations like React-Canvas that don&#x27;t use the DOM&#x2F;diffing mechanism at all -- they just invalidate the whole top level &quot;viewport&quot;.