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Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

The only reason we have 10,000 UI libraries in the last 20 years is because we decided to keep default browser UI ugly and bare-bones for some reason.

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That's a good thing in my opinion. Don't give me a set of 25 controls, instead make it easy to make my own. Because no matter what you include in default controls, I am going to need 12 more.

But the default set has been lacking for too long now too. Webbrowsers should really get together and make a new default set of Application-based UI controls, and make them a bit more beautiful by default. :)

Like datatables, rich-text editing, toolbars,...

MOST applications are just simpler CRUD UIs. Developing these is still too complex on the web platform.

Or: we as users can wish for the days of 90's web design and bring it back! The main content was so much more up front. Forms, buttons, and general layout were all the same.

And Progressive Enhancement has it that our bells and whistles gracefully degrade back to from whence they came.

> instead make it easy to make my own.

But browsers don't do that either. And you really, really don't want to make your own controls most of the time. Because: https://drewdevault.com/2021/06/27/You-cant-capture-the-nuan...

I think it's also because every site wants their buttons etc. to look slightly different to every other site's, because branding. Being able to stand out from the crowd is a feature.

Personally, I wish that for accessibility and other reasons, all 10000 frameworks would produce buttons with some kind of metadata that lets a user configure their own settings. But we're quite far off that.

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