Comment by WA
19 days ago
> when all someone knows is React or other frameworks, things get overengineered
The next level annoyance is that everybody just assumes React to be the default for everything.
Check the Shadcn website. The landing page doesn’t mention that this is a React-only UI library at all. Same with Radix. The marketing sounds like a general-purpose UI lib. You gotta dig around a bit to realize that this is React-only.
For pure HTML pages I use Basecoat which is shadcn without React: https://basecoatui.com/
Thanks, I did not know this existed and I find it awesome. How was the experience using it? I wonder if it's well maintained or if it has any annoying quirks.
But that's just classically styled library like bootstrap? How is it in any way similar to shadcn where you copy the component definitions to your code and restyle them with tailwind? It looks visually similar, but completely misses the point of why someone would use shadcn. Also many of the components have degraded functionality on firefox, I couldn't use this in an actual production application.
Personally I also tend to hate on what React has made the modern web, and I say this as someone who's made money for the past 10 years making React apps, but reimplementing half of something poorly and declaring success because it looks kinda similar when you squint is just silly. Many (most?) "pure html frameworks" are like this unfortunately.
New to webdev, coming from graphics:
What is better than react? I started with direct dom manipulation and it was a nightmare for making a 'modern' experience.
my brain for whatever reason won't accept react it's just instant ejection. i was there in the before times all the way up till jquery became uncool and i just tuned out of front end entirely once react and all the stuff driven by facebook became so ubiquitous, my soul just does not want to dabble in any of it. i think im mostly just appalled at what feels like over complexity that might've made sense over a decade ago but perhaps im waiting for a more satisfying paradigm to come along. i dunno. i had some sparks of joy tinkering with golang to build ssr stuff, i dont keep up with wasm at all but i hope its cruising along.
i wonder if what im after is like some kinda dead simple easy to use declarative front end api that can be built from a backend, something like streamlit or nicegui that has great ergonomics and is easy to maintain but scales better and has better state mgmt than streamlit & puts all the power of a general purpose programming language right there with it. i love compiled things i hate setting up environments with runtimes and stuff.
I get the feeling. From someone outside looking in (haven’t done web work since the heyday of Rails), React and the associated modern stack looks a whole lot like a Homermobile built on the frame and engine of a go-kart, all held together with duct tape and twine sourced from TEMU. The idea that this is the web’s “final form” is difficult to stomach.
Obligatory "you should try Svelte"
I've started straight up being doubtful of every UI kit until I see in the docs a HTML or non-React example.
There is a Vue version as well.
Here it is: https://www.shadcn-vue.com/