It admittedly does not do a good job at being very DRY but I think that’s poorly applied to HTML/CSS in general, and the most DRY css is often over abstracted to the point of becoming nigh uninterpretable.
Really what I want to see is beautiful TDD for CSS so that uniformity can be enforced, but I’m not sure that exists.
At least html and CSS are both presentation. React/JSX now confuses presentation and business logic.
React was originally designed to be the "V in MVC". You can still use it that way. React becomes very simple when you only use it as the V in MVC.
V stands for View. This layer handles HTML and CSS. You can use React here.
C stands for Controller. Controllers know about Views and Models and which model objects to instantiate for which view. It makes REST API calls and does caching, and handles errors. Controllers know about the application state and decide what page to display next.
For an application written in this style see: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka/tree/master/webapp/Clie...
(This app doesn't use React, but does use TSX, and you could use React as well).
In practice, the entire JS ecosystem enjoys flying off the rails, every season, but it's not strictly react's fault.
To answer your question, however those props get into the component is up the the M & C. can be async server, or shoved in as json in the script tag.
Mainly this avoids the hell that global state SPA patterns produce: redux, reducer patterns in general, and 8 thousand context providers.
I do think there's use cases that warrant global in-memory state, but it's such a pain in the ass to maintain and evolve, i'd always plan against it. Every html node in your app does not need to know about literally everything going on and react instantly to it. it just doesn't.
Just make another page!
Also: so the islands pattern can be as fancy or rudimentary as desired. they can bootstrap themselves via async endpoints, they can be shipped as web components even, or they can be static, pre-hydrated in some manner.
The global state SPA pattern fails for a more fundamental reason than just being painful to maintain: it creates an implicit contract between every component in the app. Change one reducer and you're debugging side effects three layers away. Islands make the contract explicit — each one owns its data, full stop.
The one gotcha I've hit is cross-island communication. PostMessage works but gets messy. Custom events on a shared DOM ancestor end up being the cleanest pattern for the rare cases where islands genuinely need to coordinate.
Who uses MVC in 2026? Pretty much every framework out there, including Java frameworks and Python frameworks and .net
@scope fixes a lot of this, but it is a complex problem. With tailwind you mostly have to worry about inheritance
And now with AI generated code i see so many wrapper patterns that forward endless props down, it's crazy!
TLDR: i almost always end up branching out into evergreen "reusable" components anyway.
Very unlikely the component library the CTO asked claude to DRY up the code with, is the one to rule them all.
<div class="relative before:absolute before:top-0 before:h-px before:w-[200vw] before:bg-gray-950/5 dark:before:bg-white/10 before:-left-[100vw] after:absolute after:bottom-0 after:h-px after:w-[200vw] after:bg-gray-950/5 dark:after:bg-white/10 after:-left-[100vw]"><p class="max-w-(--breakpoint-md) px-2 text-base/7 text-gray-600 max-sm:px-4 dark:text-gray-400">Because Tailwind is so low-level, it never encourages you to design the same site twice. Some of your favorite sites are built with Tailwind, and you probably had no idea.</p></div>
Tailwind works for your team? Go for it.
Inline CSS for your solo project? By all means.
Still stuck on SASS? It'll keep working just fine.
All in on modern CSS? More power to ya!These green percentage points at the bottom left show how many of the Web audience (IDK by what measurements) runs a browser supporting this feature. A ton of them are even below 50%.
So I suppose it's not "modern CSS", but more like "latest Chrome CSS". Best viewed in Internet Explorer 5.
Browsers: Yeah, but beware of limited availability, most of those creative examples are in the 40-50% browsers support range.
For example instead of grid center, one can use flex and margin auto.
If you are building really nation-wide products, there are still a lot of guys in corporate with old windows (where even chrome stopped updating like win7). Or, you know, old or poor people with PC from 2008.
Also don’t forget guys with mobile phones: not like one could easily install a browser there. Especially on phones which no longer receive updates.
So writing CSS like it is 2015 is great. Not because it feels great but because it is what caring about your users (and business) is.
Otherwise you’ll get humbled by your clients soon enough. And in corporate they won’t even be your clients unless you support old stuff: IE 11 is a great target if you really want to shine.
It would be utterly negligent to still be running IE in a corporate environment. It’s a huge security risk.
Could you explain this? What prevents the browser from running applications? How should it have been architected otherwise if running applications was the goal?
I too am saddened by the instant-polish marketing pages everyone and their grandma deploys to Render, but also some people at some point in time really did make these effects. And they are nice. HTML based UIs will always have a place in my heart.
Btw: actually I think webflow did more to pump this stuff out to the masses. The animate on scroll being the biggest offender. It's so good, but not for every literal text paragraph on your local bakery's website.