by stephenr | 2026-01-14 08:00:03+00:00
> you don't have personal experience with this type of development, so you might not see what pain points it solves.

That all depends what you mean by "this type of development".

Do you mean development targeting a browser? Do you mean development targeting client-side interaction in a browser? Or do you mean writing JSX/React/Whatever flavour of the week is hip with the NodeJS community?

If you meant either of the first two: I have about 20 years experience.

If you meant the last: No. If I wanted to be a masochist that badly I'd buy my wife a leather whip and a strap on.

As much as I generally avoid front-end dev when I can now, at one point it was a much greater part of my work. I've written modular/resuable client-side libraries/widgets (i.e. self-contained elements that other developers then used in their own separate projects to add functionality... you know, a "component" by another name) since IE6 was not just in-use, but current and popular. So to rebut your claim: I'm well aware of the "pain points" developing code like this for re-use.

> You're going to have a very unpleasant time implementing that with globally scoped CSS classes.

Have you ever used CSS or Bootstrap before? You know that bootstrap is meant to be a starting point for your codebase, right? Even the most bare-bones official Bootstrap "example" designs use custom CSS specific to that use-case. If you're trying to create anything beyond the most basic hello world page with nothing but bootstrap classes on your markup, you're doing it wrong.

If your argument for using Tailwind (and apparently by necessity, JSX components) is to avoid having someone write a handful of CSS rules specific to the widget you're creating, I can't help you mate.

> It's hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. But, do you know another way to deploy software that's cross-platform and basically free of gatekeepers? Sometimes we just have to do weird things because they're really useful.

My argument isn't against using Javascript for interactivity on webpages/webapps. As I said, I've been doing it for a couple of decades now. I have my issues with JS, but for browser interaction it's mostly fine.

You see the "current ecosystem" the NodeJS/Javascript community has created, complain about it being "hacks upon hacks" and then still defend the batshit crazy stuff when someone calls it out.

I see the batshit crazy stuff and just ignore it. Just because something new exists, doesn't mean you have to use it. The browser environment for JS is slowly improving, gaining native abilities that we once had implement in libraries or from scratch.... and the majority of the JS-focussed community seems to continue to be obsessed with adding more and more and more layers of abstraction.

If you told 20-year-ago me that the browsers would all supported a native way to implement custom elements (i.e. Web Components) that can be initiated using regular markup in the page, it would never once have occurred to me that the JS developers of the day would then find some way to not just use the built-in capabilities and instead have a dependency chain and build system so complex there are fucking memes about it.