spectrum-web-components VS Tailwind CSS

For example, all the following design systems can be used without tooling (some of them provide ready-to-use bundles, others can be used through import maps): Google's Material Web, Microsoft's Fluent UI, IBM's Carbon, Adobe's Spectrum, Nordhealth's Nord, Shoelace, etc.

sp- (Spectrum components from Adobe6)

Spectrum web components by Adobe is really mature design system that makes a lot of usage of Lit Elements. Their testing setup uses the suggested web test runner. Lit's documentation on testing suggests using that library.

In Fable.Lit rather than building an F# DSL (we tried) we use a string-based alternative which is closed to the HTML you know and love, this also helps a lot when you have to consume web components like those from shoelace.style, fast.design, adobe spectrum components, and more, this will be a very important and big point over the next few years now that web components have taken off finally with major companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Github, Adobe and more are using them.

Oh hey, that me! We at Adobe are investing heavily in web editors built with web component technology. Not just Photoshop, but Illustrator, Lightroom, and a number of brand new or in development applications across the company, as well.

We’re also leveraging web components to support interoperability of our design system across teams who still choose to use frameworks or have been using them all this time. In this way we ship https://opensource.adobe.com/spectrum-web-components/ and teams like fonts.adobe.com that have a long standing Angular app, or edex.adobe.com with their long standing Vue app or various recent acquisitions with their own technical decisions, can all consume Spectrum design without shipping their own implementation or rewriting their app to another stack.

The ease of building at depth scale for large applications and at breadth scale for applications no matter their architectural decisions has been a huge win for Adobe and our goals to drive consistency and quality across the company. The speed and scope at which we’ve been able to do so just wouldn’t be possible without web components.

Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss the difficulties, learnings, and victories or developing Spectrum Web Components together with fellow custom element developers from teams at IBM, ING, SAP, and Vaadin. If you missed the live stream, check out the recording! Fellow panelist, Ari Gilmore, made a great point that there is a lack of reading material for developers like ourselves to draw from when looking to build solid accessibility practices into the web components space. With that in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to take some of the abstract concepts we discussed in the panel and share some actual examples of working and testable code. Hopefully, this can better support the next developer(s) looking to bring a high-quality, accessible, design system to life for their team via web components.

Their repos are public: - https://github.com/adobe/spectrum-web-components - https://github.com/adobe/react-spectrum

It does seem like I enjoy a good . I mean, look, I wrote about them all the way back in 2018 in ing in Some Tips, and then in 2020, I spoke about Stacked Slots at a virtual Web Components SF meetup (see the associated slides), before sharing a proof of concept for Light DOM as Model. And, as if that weren't enough, here we are again, and I'm writing to you, friend, about s. Today, we're going to get out of the theoretical and into the practical as we start on the path towards actual usage of Stacked Slots that I'm excited to bring to life as part of Adobe's Spectrum Web Components to support the delivery of Spectrum design's Help Text pattern.

Finally, for our front end, we’re going to be pairing Next.js with the great combination of TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui so we can focus on building the functionality of the app and let them handle making it look awesome!

You can use any frontend framework you want — react-based tooling, however, has a natural advantage as it models everything as a function of state, which can map 1:1 with the concept in Burr. In the demo app we use react, react-query, and tailwind, but we’ll be skipping over this largely (it is not central to the purpose of the post).

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.

First, you need to make sure that you have a working Tailwind CSS project…

Tailwind CSS

With better CSS approaches like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract (which we're heavily using) it's much easier to maintain the UI and make sure it doesn't change unexpectedly. No more conflicting CSS classes, much less CSS specificity issues and much less CSS code in general.

This app was built with Svelte Kit, Tailwind CSS, and many other technologies. For a full rundown, please visit the GitHub repository

Unlike Tailwind, which has over 77,000 stars on GitHub, Mojo CSS has about 200 stars on GitHub. But the Mojo CSS documentation is fairly good and you can find most of the information you’ll need there.

JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite

- Performance is a feature.

Another common interpretation of brutalism is aesthetic, reacting to overly complicated user interfaces by creating simpler, more direct ones. Tailwind CSS (https://tailwindcss.com), one of today's most popular CSS libraries, promotes this approach in its component examples. There's also a neat library I've seen recently called "Neobrutalism Components" for React that I like (https://neobrutalism-components.vercel.app), providing components with a similar look and feel to Gumroad. This might more accurately be called 'Neo-Brutalism,' as noted in the comments.

A more engineering-centric interpretation of Brutalism focuses on form, structure, and efficiency, drawing significantly from brutalist architecture principles. Apart from the user interface itself, most mobile, desktop, and web applications are extremely bloated and often perform worse than sites from 10 years ago did. While one HTML file might be "less brutalist" than the original HN site, it is substantially more brutalist than any HN mobile app in existence, and offers nearly identical functionality.

A broader interpretation of brutalism, which could be termed 'Meta-Brutalism,' is embodied in the overall experience on this site through UX flows. Yes, in the strictest sense, the original HN site is more Brutalist in many ways, but it only shows 30 articles at a time and does not function as a PWA. For this site, the experience of reading 10 stories is arguably less brutalist, but for quickly browsing through several pages and skimming articles (which is how I read HN) it is a lot faster, and in my opinion, more Brutalist.

My primary inspiration was addressing software and tool bloat in UIs rather than strictly adhering to every principle set forth by David Bryant Copeland. I don't find it convincing that this site "isn't brutalist" compared to really any other experience apart from the Main HN site, and I would argue the overall experience is more brutalist in its performance and scrolling behavior.

As a side note: I generally don't like Brutalist architecture that much although I believe it is unfairly maligned. I visited the Salk Institute once and enjoyed it though (https://www.archdaily.com/61288/ad-classics-salk-institute-l...).