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I'm a crusty old HTML and CSS person. The problem is that most of the skills are in the marketing department - not engineering. I've noticed lately a huge "Rea

I'm a crusty old HTML and CSS person. The problem is that most of the skills are in the marketing department - not engineering. I've noticed lately a huge "React-ification" in the past few years where the UI on apps are both getting overly designed, but also more confusing and worse. Bigger buttons, bigger text, overuse of whitespace, bad pagination and breadcrumbs, etc. There are a lot of best practices that were "solved" a decade ago that now seem to be getting lost. And the explanation that I have is that React and Figma have made it so easy to spin up a web app without any prior experience or reliance on prior works. "Enough rope to hang themselves" as the saying goes. I worked with an engineering team that was struggling with their UI. The buttons were all the wrong sizes, colors weren't consistent, placement wasn't consistent, etc. I asked them if they were using a CSS framework at all and the response was "we are using React, we don't need one".

al_borland 2y ago
> I asked them if they were using a CSS framework at all and the response was "we are using React, we don't need one". This hurt my brain. I recently saw a video where a guy was claiming that people who had gone through a web development bootcamp (using React and the whole nine), where unable to make a basic hello world HTML file. When people don’t know the basics, it’s no wonder everything is over complicated. They were never taught how it could be simple.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  > This hurt my brain. Why? It's straight up correct. Sure, you could still use a css framework, but you really don't need to once you're using any frontend library. Each component comes with it's own styles, that makes the css framework redundant, as a component library gives you a better development experience with the same effect. Add a few global vars for theme colorings, default spacing etc and it becomes pretty straightforward to maintain a coherent UI even across repositories/teams (or distribute a tailwind config,works even better imo)
  - al_borland 2y ago
    That’s assuming they are using a component library that has a common system for its styles. If their end result was an inconsistent UI, it doesn’t sound like they were. They could have been making their own components, or mixing component libraries, with inconsistent styles, based on whatever the first search result was for their need.
- Spivak 2y ago
  It's kinda right. React says manage complexity through encapsulation, CSS as intended to be used says impale straight through the layers via global namespace and a brittle rats nest of interdependency via the side-channel of selectors. CSS as simply a DSL for styling components and hooks into the layout engine like how other GUI frameworks work is fine, but you don't need a framework for that. We all generally agree that inheritance is hard to keep clean but in CSS it's venerated for some reason.
adregan 2y ago
As an additional example: when I was first cutting my teeth on the web as an amateur in high school, I remember reading about the ills of "mystery meat" navigation and I can recall the hard fought battle to excise it from UIs. Now 20+ years later, it's back in force. Perhaps we expected that the lessons we collectively learned about good design would be self-evident to the next generation or that there would be a knowledge transfer, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The web (and most software really) seems to go through such extreme cycles of destruction and rebirth for the sake of marketing—and resume building, if we are being honest—that it's sometimes hard to find a throughline from the designs of yesterday to today. I think about it all the time when there is an OS update (mac) that moves the state of design off into a direction that is in conflict with the design ethos of the past. I realize then that the designers and engineers likely never even used a classic OS let alone read the work of Jef Raskin or the Macintosh HIG. It's really weird that the industry casually sloughs off lessons of the past. I don't think we should be restricted to only designing as we did in the past, but I do think that it's beneficial to understand where we came from.

al_borland 2y ago

> I asked them if they were using a CSS framework at all and the response was "we are using React, we don't need one". This hurt my brain. I recently saw a video where a guy was claiming that people who had gone through a web development bootcamp (using React and the whole nine), where unable to make a basic hello world HTML file. When people don’t know the basics, it’s no wonder everything is over complicated. They were never taught how it could be simple.

ffsm8 2y ago
> This hurt my brain. Why? It's straight up correct. Sure, you could still use a css framework, but you really don't need to once you're using any frontend library. Each component comes with it's own styles, that makes the css framework redundant, as a component library gives you a better development experience with the same effect. Add a few global vars for theme colorings, default spacing etc and it becomes pretty straightforward to maintain a coherent UI even across repositories/teams (or distribute a tailwind config,works even better imo)
- al_borland 2y ago
  That’s assuming they are using a component library that has a common system for its styles. If their end result was an inconsistent UI, it doesn’t sound like they were. They could have been making their own components, or mixing component libraries, with inconsistent styles, based on whatever the first search result was for their need.
Spivak 2y ago
It's kinda right. React says manage complexity through encapsulation, CSS as intended to be used says impale straight through the layers via global namespace and a brittle rats nest of interdependency via the side-channel of selectors. CSS as simply a DSL for styling components and hooks into the layout engine like how other GUI frameworks work is fine, but you don't need a framework for that. We all generally agree that inheritance is hard to keep clean but in CSS it's venerated for some reason.

adregan 2y ago

As an additional example: when I was first cutting my teeth on the web as an amateur in high school, I remember reading about the ills of "mystery meat" navigation and I can recall the hard fought battle to excise it from UIs. Now 20+ years later, it's back in force. Perhaps we expected that the lessons we collectively learned about good design would be self-evident to the next generation or that there would be a knowledge transfer, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The web (and most software really) seems to go through such extreme cycles of destruction and rebirth for the sake of marketing—and resume building, if we are being honest—that it's sometimes hard to find a throughline from the designs of yesterday to today. I think about it all the time when there is an OS update (mac) that moves the state of design off into a direction that is in conflict with the design ethos of the past. I realize then that the designers and engineers likely never even used a classic OS let alone read the work of Jef Raskin or the Macintosh HIG. It's really weird that the industry casually sloughs off lessons of the past. I don't think we should be restricted to only designing as we did in the past, but I do think that it's beneficial to understand where we came from.