uhtml VS Tailwind CSS

I have to say that I am an extremist minimalist, so I use a nano-framework I developed for the frontend, with uhtml (https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml) and some JavaScript libraries to help.

One of the main decisions I had to make early on was template handling, there are many approaches out there and of course, with React being the king, I first tried implementing a VirtualDOM complete with JSX support and whatnot... well that didn't really worked for what I was trying to achieve, so I moved into Tagged Template Literals (through µhtml) and tried to stick to standards as much as possible by building on top of the Custom Elements API.

FAST rendering thanks to µhtml

Challenge: With declarative rendering, oftentimes entire DOM trees are re-painted because of simple prop or state changes that could have been handled faster by imperative DOM manipulation. I wanted a framework that, like Lit, only updated content or attributes that had changed instead of re-painting entire DOM elements and trees. Solution: I chose µhtml for the default templating system because it accomplishes this goal and other advanced templating features in a tiny bundle size. To make rendering even faster and smoother, I throttled uhtml's rendering using requestAnimationFrame.

> There are lighter-weight shadow dom frameworks out there (than Vue/React/Angular) so why would you want to write one yourself?

You can even avoid a shadow DOM entirely:

https://github.com/WebReflection/domdiff

https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml

My next goal would be to discard snabbdom (and virtualdom) and use custom elements. For that I'm evaluating a library like https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml and all it's ecosystem of utility

Yep ditched React since 2015, it's still the same mess today. They all not trying to encourage interoperability, and comes with their own build .. seriously? Frontend should be just libs! Use https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml or lit-html where things should be highly dynamic.

If it's for getting into job market, go for React. If it's for learning declarative ui, build cool stuff real quick without tooling, go with lit-html or bravely go with https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml (it's more simple than anything else, yet powerful)

A tiny dom lib like https://github.com/WebReflection/uhtml is more than enough for very complicated UI, with understanding how events work, will be able to implement very thin state management on top. With game programming styled manual render() call here and there as needed, pretty neat.

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...).

- Staff Software Engineer ($275k/yr): https://tailwindcss.com/careers/staff-software-engineer

We're small, independent, and profitable, with a team of just 6 people doing millions in revenue, and growing sustainably every year. You'd work directly with the founders on open-source software used by millions of people.

If you like the idea of working on a small team that cares about craft and isn't trying to achieve VC scale, I think this is a pretty awesome place to do your best work.