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Comment by killerstorm | Hacker News Reader

Actually browsers already come with a minimal UI library. It's called HTML + CSS + JS.

There's actually no need to make any wrappers - you describe what you want in HTML and make it look good with CSS.

You only need to make UI using JS only for complex components.

Case study: I tried porting an old strategy game from pygame to web using codex. Codex decided that it doesn't need any library and raw-dogged HTML. It was able to match look and feel of an old UI with a very simple, maintenable code. Doing that with just CSS sounds kinda tedious to me, but it can be done, and honestly it looks more maintenable than any UI library.

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The problem is really folks trying to one-size-fits-all web projects. React basically exists to give a “good enough” GUI toolkit functionality in the browser. On the other hand, the web was built to publish content as in articles and information. Everything kind of sits somewhere on the continuum between static content and the interactive app experience. At the extreme it can be interactive “art” piece.

It is important to consider digital media (as in art medium) best to convey an idea. And folks should start with HTML/CSS. Minimally, JS can be used for client-side validation. But that’s not necessary since the server needs to validate anyway.

I think main reason people choose React now is "nobody was fired for choosing React". (That used to be a saying about IBM as a vendor.) People can build their career around React.

And it is better "job security" than pure HTML+JS: React apps need constant maintenance

Another reason are SaaS and iPaaS SDKs having it as favoured stack, which kind of builds on your assertion.

> React basically exists to give a “good enough” GUI toolkit functionality in the browser.

and it’s sole usage for so many apps is one of the top-five reasons, following 2010s SPA frameworks, that people believe web apps inherently suck.

For me, what the browser needs it's a good DX to build components, I kind of like Svelte and Vue in that regard, where your CSS, HTML and JS lives all together.

Writing a CSS file with the time will start growing and at some point will be very hard to know what to keep and what to delete, I think this is the reason why tailwind became popular, because it keep only the used rules, now the downside is that now your html elements has ton of classes.

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