Comment by lmm
8 days ago
> HTML/CSS is native and understanding it is a requirement for React.
It's not necessary and the ROI is poor IMO, especially for CSS. Better to just use React for everything and not worry about the implementation details; yes those details will sometimes help you debug, just like knowing machine code will occasionally help you debug your compiled code, but it's not something to put a lot of your learning budget into.
> It also doesn't require Node and a build step.
The point is assuming you already have node and a build step. You already know React. So just use it for everything. Everyone who thinks they can "just write HTML/CSS" ends up introducing Hugo or Gatsby or whatnot (or, worse, writing their own "simple" Makefiles and shell scripts) and gradually adding more and more features until it's just as complex as React. Just use React.
> It's not necessary and the ROI is poor IMO, especially for CSS. Better to just use React for everything and not worry about the implementation details; yes those details will sometimes help you debug, just like knowing machine code will occasionally help you debug your compiled code, but it's not something to put a lot of your learning budget into.
...what? What are you writing in React if not HTML tags and CSS classes? How can you even write anything in React without that? React doesn't do anything CSS specific either, so I don't understand how you'd even style anything if HTML and CSS were not a "necessity."
> What are you writing in React if not HTML tags and CSS classes?
UIs made of React components. I try to avoid having to know or care about the underlying implementation details.
> I try to avoid having to know or care about the underlying implementation details.
This feels quite ignorant. I'm not sure, in some ways I understand it, for example, when running software on the JVM, I typically don't think about how it's implemented, so I share some of that ignorance.
At the same time, specializing to just knowing one technology (e.g. React) and not caring about up or down the stack can also be limiting - both for any career moves (Vue? Angular? working with how the resources are packaged and deployed?) as well as just debugging things in more detail (since one can feasibly imagine cases where you need to look at both the output HTML/CSS/JS to understand why certain things are happening, not just a React plugin in DevTools).
You don't have to learn things that are of no value right now, but you probably shouldn't go out of your way to not learn things. Staying curious is generally pretty nice!
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And what are in those components? Divs with a className property I assume? Or are you literally only using components other people have made in UI libraries with no changes of your own?
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