I think it's valiant to try to do all of this with semantic HTML elements to achieve the right effects, and try to go for a "classless CSS" paradigm to get a nice looking and functional web app (as a fan of classless CSS myself). But scrolling through the component catalog, it unfortunately feels like it's all over the place and inconsistent with semantic vs basic elements, data tags vs aria attributes, and sprinkling some css classes over some of it.
I do very much like that by introducing aria attributes, the CSS reacts to it and styles it appropriately. As opposed to a full-blown react component library which does all of that for you. It would be a good exercise for developers to think aria-first and let the library just help with styling.
Lastly, I think the best part is that this component library has a native sidebar. So many of these I see and they have a nice web page which showcases all the components and I want to replicate their layout and nav/sidebars but they only focus on smaller re-usable components and not the layout. So that's a nice touch, I think. And, as someone who keeps an eye on but doesn't do a lot of frontend, the fact that a sidebar is an aside > nav > ul next to a main just makes so much sense and doesn't have a lot of cruft around it.
This site got me going. Almost had whiplash when I tapped a link and the page loaded literally instantly. I've almost forgotten that that's possible on the internet. I'm not a web dev, but I'm inspired to get into it now because of this site.
This has the simplicity I thought I was going to get from DaisyUI but didn’t. Pairing this with Datastar seems like a super powerful combination that leans on actual web standards, not “ecosystems”.
The motivating blog post[1] linked from the front page is probably going to generate a more interesting discussion than the framework itself.
As someone who has to deal with both angular and nextjs for different (but overlapping) stacks at work, I find myself increasingly sympathetic to this viewpoint.
There’s a ton of semantic drop in css libraries similar to this. Love seeing new ones. Quality varies wildly but this site shows 50+ drop in stylesheets for those writing semantic html: https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/
<aside> is not the correct semantic element for sidebars. The purpose of <aside> is for content that is indirectly related to the "main" content of the page. Sometimes a sidebar fits that definition but not always
Presumably it's relevant not because they use old browsers but because some of their software's users do. And I doubt most of them have a reason for doing so.
That makes sense. As a solo dev for my side projects, I’ve intentionally decided to not support legacy browsers, which I understand bugs some folks (weirdly, usually the super tech minded types you find in here) but I’m just one guy and I have a hard time seeing the value in these user segments being worth the squeeze.
I tried doing something like that in my app, and quickly discovered that some modern semantic/functional tags are STILL not supported in some browsers. Or work badly.
For example, in Safari showModal for a dialog tag causes recalculating layout for EVERY element on a page, it’s up to 59x slower than chromium…. :(
Looks good and like the lightweight aspect. As always, what do I have to do get tabs that look like tabs? What do people have against tabs that look like tabs, instead of buttons?
The "preview" and "code" buttons in the components break the "alt+arrow" bindings to go back to the previous page. Instead it just alternates between "preview" and "code".
Why do all the UI component libraries always feature an accordion (something i can build myself in 5 minutes and very rarely need), but always omit a date picker / calendar component (something that is needed almost in every corporate web form and really requires a lot of effort to build)?
That one is highly inconsistent, on some platforms its useless. For instance on Chrome/linux entering historic dates via the datepicker takes minutes to slowly scroll through the years. Always build your own datepicker, you know better what UX pattern will best suit your application and your users.
I know that guy from listmonk! I always thought the frontend could use some love and planned to spend a couple of days on contributing a couple of ideas, but I never came around. Now I know why things are as they are :)
I used to think bootstrap was bloated too...and then i had heard - now, i don't know if its true - that bootstrap was originally intended *ONLY* as an internal prototype building tool, and any bloat did not matter...because expected audience, usage would be totally fine for a bloated framework...When i heard, i gave boostrap more of a pass...but, then again, i stopped using it, and began using other, lighter weight frameworks...and nowadays, i so rarely touch any web stuff...and when i do its only for me so then use zero frameworks, and merely display whatever default the browser shows with zero CSS, javascript...then again, my private web page needs are so basic anyway.
This is a very nice library. At a first reading it seems complete (but did I see summary/detail - I don't remember). Bookmarked for further investigation. Congratulations and thank you.
This is gorgeous. I hate frontend because of its sheer gratuity, and this is the kind of thing that might get me back into it. The only other contender for interactivity I'd consider is HTMX, and I'm going to boldly assume I'll be able to combine them without too much bother.
Bravo to the author, keep at it. I'll be recommending this to anyone who will listen.
Seems pretty unresponsive to me. I'm getting at least half a second of delay before the accordion, drop-down, or switch do anything. Chrome on Windows.
My initial reaction was that I have to use this just because of the buzzword density in the title. But after reading up, it looks like the author was pretty successful in moving the bloat from code to announcement title. I'll give this a try!
Amazing! I recently started building something similar for the same reasons, but more out of frustration rather than out of desire. I'll have to give this one a try and see if it fills the need.
Particularly the use of the label, fieldset and legend elements as native accessible solutions instead of instrumenting divs. Even the styling and the example resembles it a bit!
This is where it falls from grace IMHO. Grid classes are fundamentally non-semantic. I know they're popular and useful, but there must be a better (semantic) way of doing this. I haven't found it yet, but there must be.
No, this is "Oat - Ultra-lightweight, semantic, zero-dependency Javascript UI component library". If it doesn't work without javascript it is not an HTML UI component library.
5 day old repo, 2000 stars on GitHub, 400 total weekly downloads on npm. Frontpage of hacker news with a bunch of weird comments. Moderation has been lacking recently.
You are jumping to conclusions. The author is the CTO of the largest online brokerage in India but more importantly, they have created many open source software of good quality. His website and blog are of great quality. Whether you think this library deserves more attention or not is your personal preference but it is far from spam. I havr no affiliation with them but like their work.
It's possible for both things to be true: this project is written by a developer well-known within India, AND this thread has a lot of bot (bought?) comments of praise in it.
That's pretty common in small companies. It's less common in large companies but can happen - you may use the "CTO" title for the founding engineer who still leads code and architecture, then hire someone under a different title (frequently "VP of Engineering") to handle the management / team growing side of the role.
That sounds like a reasonable split to me, so much so I’m not sure I’d understand why you’d want the same person handling both code/architecture and management.
CTO in my company* remains SME on a several components, commits to several production repositories (and expects the most stringent PR checks), and maintains couple of small tool used by us and the customers.
Its not that rare I think.
*small fintech with couple of billions in the accounts, not a startup, not a Fortune 500 company
I'm not sure which comments you're finding weird, but I spot checked a bunch and didn't see anything that looked particularly bogus, other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026348 and some trollish ephemera.
The upvotes on the submission look legit to me, as does the submission itself.
Sad that HN is now also getting boted by LLMs. People are just shameless. HN is one of the few places left where you can post / self promote something you have made only for people to take advantage of it.
I don't know if you're demonstrating reductio ad absurdum, but maybe that's because they are genuine? As people in the thread have pointed out, the author as well as their company is pretty well-known in software circles. They have had multiple projects discussed on HN in the past[1]. 2000 stars is not a lot given that [2].
I fail to understand why a ton of breathless blog posts about the process of AI-assisted coding are more interesting to HNers than some of the actual code (potentially, not claiming anything about it) written.
Maybe you or the GP could actually say what you think are "weird comments" and why you think this is being "boted"?
[2] Why are people obsessed with star counts? I at least only star things to bookmark them, not vouch for them in any way. It does not seem unreasonable to me that 5 times as many people bookmarked the repo in the early days than are using it on npm. Also, npm is not necessary, the author shows at least 2 other ways to use it (direct download, link to GitHub pages) which will not show up in npm stats.
An explanation that would fit both the old accounts and the artificial comments would be that they were encouraged by the author to comment (which is against the HN rules).
They're probably just Indians using the framework saying "thanks." India has the largest population on Earth, they're close to 1.5 billion now. I think some people underestimate what that means.
This seems like some pretty lazy analysis to be honest.
Following the first comment you quoted...
> I love it. We need to see more of this.
...shows that the author talks about using a “Chase card abroad” in a previous comment [1], which means they cannot be Indian as Chase doesn't issue cards or have substantial operations in India.
I don't want to run around following specific comment authors back through their threads, but as an Indian by birth it is pretty hurtful to see this kind of drive-by casual characterization of an population in a space like this. It also seems to be pretty contrary to the HN guidelines (“Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.”)
It is probably not bots. The reach of authors is pretty good. He actually loyal fan followers in india. You can see the same when he shows up on a podcast or talk.
I think theres alot indian developers who are hacker news as well as on github and other forums.
Perhaps stolen accounts? I doubt every user is practising good security hygiene with a unique password per each account. Password leaks from other sites might well allow a motivated individual to hijack some here.
I could speculate that someone in the past had the business mindset to create thousands of accounts over multiple sites and offers the ability to loan them out for a period of time.
This is kind of misleading. It says it's an HTML UI library, then it says HTML + CSS, and then it says it also includes JavaScript. Why is this better than, say, DaisyUI?
I just want something that's as easy to use as DaisyUI or even Bulma with one good set of components & themeing(beyond just palletes, like rounding, blur, transparency etc) & I'm good. For all the self-hosting model afficianados surely needing a build platform to create a blackhole of npm modules & internet connectivity for even a single build surely negates the entire point of a coding LLM if we still force it to deal with frontend
Which actually makes sense: Oat's driving philosophy seems to be to use and enhance native controls as much as possible, and the date picker is already a native type on the input element.