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Being limited to highly abstracted libraries leads to worse UI because you have to shoehorn your app into the limited set of forms the library allows you to express.

If you just want some boilerplate UI in a hurry, this is fine (it’s actually better) but it sets an upper bound for how good the UI can ever be and that’s a problem for serious professionals.

Of course most UI is horrible but that’s true no matter what framework you give them. There’s always somebody using checkboxes as radio buttons.



Funny how this argument was opposed against libraries in the early days of programming.


I think it’s an argument for small, composable libraries. Think Go’s std instead of Java’s Spring.


UI components can be small, and customizable enough to do anything.

The HTML is an excellent exemple at that.

You are never "limited" by highly abstracted librairies since at any moment, you can write your fully customized one.

And no, a customized components is not immediately better.

Good Library UI components have, i18n, accessibility, and good mobile UX.

The comment "I can do a decent calendar in react in a few minutes" shows exactly this: it's infuriating to use on mobile.


The web is exactly a bad argument, it composes terribly. You can make n*m divs for the days for a calendar widget, it won’t be recognized as a date selector. While swing, or even earlier GUI iterations realized that inheritance is a very sane model for GUI frameworks.


You know you can inherit the HTML date picker right?

... right ?


I actually don't know what you mean. Can you please tell me?


Webcomponents allow inheriting html built in elements.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...

> Customized built-in elements inherit from basic HTML elements.


Thanks. I always wanted to look into web components, sounds interesting.




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