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Comment by tipiirai

1 day ago

I want to address Markdown and it's role in standards first development.

While MD itself isn't a web standard, it's a strategic choice that reinforces standards-first development by generating pure, semantic HTML. This creates a natural separation between content structure and visual presentation.

Consider the impact on CSS development.

In React codebases, engineers spend 90% of their time writing JavaScript - managing state, coordinating effects, optimizing builds. Style sheets become an afterthought, buried under framework patterns and utility classes.

Nue flips this ratio: codebases become 90% CSS, focusing engineering effort on systematic design through web standards. By keeping content in Markdown and presentation in stylesheets, we maximize the power of native CSS features - from custom properties and container queries to mathematical relationships for typography and spacing.

> Nue flips this ratio: codebases become 90% CSS

This shows a lack of understanding of what a modern webapp is meant to be. Again, your framework is a attempt for static blogposts & other non-interactive/minimally intercative sites. Modern javascript developers build complex webapps, whether you like it or not.

You think stripe.com (webapp) engineers are spending 90% of the time tweaking css?

  • In content-heavy websites, yes. Single-page apps are a different game obviously. this is a real number when comparing Next.js blog starter to Nue's blog starter:

    https://nuejs.org/docs/compare.html

    • > In content-heavy websites, yes. Single-page apps are a different game obviously.

      Content-heavy websites have (for me anyway) multiple acceptable solutions currently.

      I want to see what your DSL looks like for SPAs.

      To be clear, I am your target - developer who noped out of JS frameworks and want something better.

      But, like I said, I already have multiple options for separation of concerns with content-heavy or mostly-static sites. What I don't have is a decent SPA framework that neatly does separation of concerns.

There are, of course, many different flavours of Markdown. Which do you use? The best thing to come out of Markdown is probably Djot, which is inspired by Markdown but just different enough to not really be considered a flavour of Markdown. The designer, John McFarlane, put a lot of thought into it, and designed it to be easy to parse.