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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

It’s appalling that most website/app developers even have to deal with those kinds of low-level considerations, after decades of web-tech evolution, instead of using a UI builder tool (or a better UI modeling language) that provides all the building blocks for the most common 97% of use cases, and where you would need to go out of your way to create a non-accessible link.

TFA is right about LLMs, but it’s also an indictment of the web UI stack.

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By a UI modelling language, do you mean HTML or Javascript or CSS?

I mean something more suitable than the HTML+JS+CSS combination. HTML is a document markup language, not a UI definition language. CSS mixes layout with styling, which are largely orthogonal. (One should be able to specify a UI independently from styling/theming.) A programming language like Javascript shouldn’t be needed for building a UI, in the majority of cases. Most UI components and behaviors should be standard (built into browsers, or whatever is used as the UI runtime) and declarative.

So basically you’re saying someone should make mui or any other component library except built into browser. Why is that an improvement?

It would be more than a component library, but yes, more akin to traditional GUI frameworks in spirits than the HTML+CSS approach. The improvement is that it would dramatically reduce the effort needed to implement and maintain web application, make app behaviors more consistent for users, and make adherence to accessibility and other best practices the default, rather than something developers have to actively put significant effort into.

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