Material Components Preview | Hacker News Reader

Material Components Preview

material.io

127 pointsgcoguiec55 comments

They took the time to make a marketing landing page but couldn't take a few mins to put up the material-components-web demo online? That's one of the web's killer features! It's a bit disappointing to find that missing.

I'm ambivalent about material design. I'd love it if the spec were being developed in the open, instead of just throwing an update over the wall every few months. In the past I've noticed contradictions or bugs in the spec, but I don't have anywhere to report it. Can we report those to material-components [0]? In other cases I find the text confusing. Not that I blame the authors, since writing good documentation is very challenging. But people would be empowered to help improve it if were open.

Here's an example of a seeming contradiction in the buttons spec [1]: go to the "Size and padding" section. It shows "64dp min width" and it has "8dp external padding" on each side: 64dp + 8dp + 8dp = 80dp. But then below that it says "Minimum width: 88dp". Where does the remaining 8dp come from? Which one is correct? The "Minimum width: 88dp" point appears a few time, but it's contradicted by multiple buttons on the same page. For example, the dialog's "agree" button or the "share" button in the Top 10 Australian beaches card.

[0] https://github.com/material-components/material-components

[1] https://material.io/guidelines/components/buttons.html

The demo is mostly here:

https://getmdl.io/

A complete new implementation has been underway since roughly the beginning of this year. They called it v2.0 of mdl and has been under heavy development. Some of their designs is pretty nice:

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

With the linked announcement they just renamed the mdl project to "material-components-web", nothing more:

https://github.com/google/material-design-lite/issues/4984

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

I just cloned their new repo and started the compiled demos. I see no difference in behavior/design of the new components compared to the old mdl but the architecture is much more modular and can easily be used in any JS framework.

I'm excited about this development. I'm really looking forward to a web implementation of Material Design that is not bound to Angular 1 and is production ready. I did a few projects using React + Material Design that was enabled by Material-UI component set. [0] And although Material-UI seems like a really great implementation for React, it's certainly not production ready yet. I did spend a significant amount of time fixing / messing with its code to make things work relatively smoothly.

Regarding the Google's MDC-Web [1] the demos look promising, although the components seem to lack polish and animations sometimes get stuck. I hope they will push them to the point where these components will be as good as Angular Material ones. [2]

[0] - http://www.material-ui.com

[1] - https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

[2] - https://material.angularjs.org/latest/demo/button

Take a look at https://react-md.mlaursen.com it's the most complete and best looking Material implementation I've seen so far!

I also had my fair share of experience with all the material-ui, react-mdl, materialize and what not. None of them is production ready. Even if you used plain mdl (which is by Google) there's so much missing like select, calendar, etc

While it's not Material, Semantic UI React (http://react.semantic-ui.com/introduction) has been pretty fun to work with.

Does that page seriously require es6 (in production)!?

https://puu.sh/sRdzE/f9a952f073.png

I'm really excited about the web version of this. I think Google is doing fantastic work, making material design available to and usable by the community. I'm sure their motives aren't entirely altruistic, but I appreciate them nonetheless.

As a nit, I'm not very fond of their CSS naming conventions, using a lot of double underscores and double dashes. For example:

> <section class="mdc-card__actions mdc-card__actions--vertical">

Seems like this could be cleaned up a bit with something like:

> <section class="mdc-card-actions mdc-card-actions-vertical">

But... this is just a matter of personal taste. I'm sure they have their reasons for the approach they took.

For better or worse, there is reason behind the naming convention. It is known as BEM[1] -- block-element-modifier -- and I've seen quite a few design shops adopt it as standard.

[1]: http://getbem.com/naming/

Oh, that's interesting. Thanks for the link!

The conventions they use look like BEM, which is a relatively common approach for component-based design in CSS: https://css-tricks.com/bem-101/

> A material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion. The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.

I like the idea of standard design components, but sentences like these don't communicate anything.

It does communicate a bit, even if it's confusingly worded and targeted to a specific audience.

Material Design has two parts: A physical structure based on how objects lie in the real world (particularly inspired by the physical appearance paper and ink), and animations that seem magical, playful, or imaginative.

This lays out the inspiration behind material design, and differentiates it from skeumorphism: which copies real world elements unimaginatively, and simple "flat" design, which is not necessarily tactile or imbued with a system of animations or motion.

They do to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a bit puffed up in the obtuse humanities style, but I do get its meaning.

I also hate empty speak, but I think the issue here is not that it doesn't communicate anything, but it does so with overly flowery language. What I'm reading is the "material" concept unifies 1) location in space and 2) motion, and it's based in objects in the real world (e.g. paper and ink) but is a framework that can be creatively extended and built upon.

It's standard design agency rhetoric to impress customers, applied for example when a company has spent a million dollars on a new logo and a font choice, and needs some reassurance that the entire world will view them in a completely different light as soon as the newly rounded/squared/deconstructed logo graces their letterhead.

Its occurrence here indicates that Google hires expensive design professionals with impressive ad industry résumés, I guess.

Material Design is mostly linked to Matias Duarte. I would ask you to take a look at his history instead of just asserting that it's just ad industry professionals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat%C3%ADas_Duarte

I strongly disagree that this is design agency BS!

Please watch the video where they introduced material design (way back at some I/O) to see what all those words mean.

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBD0VlcVS1E

I hate MD and this video helped me to understand why I hate it: they are trying to do judge by analogy, which causes «analogy driven design», where you should understand analogy to understand what you see. I newer saw real objects to behave like their imaginary «real objects». It looks like they are just getting money for something that nobody knows how to do properly, so they are doing something and arguing correctness of their work with self-made arguments. IMHO, if they will be hired to do an animation film, they will be fired pretty quickly for their «material design», because it looks false.

Although the OP's quote is not nearly as extreme, it does remind me a little of this: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

It's a design brief that explains how the new Pepsi logo is the physical manifestation of the grand unified 'theory of everything'.... or something like that. I still can't figure out whether it's meant as a parody.

This site needs five megabytes to display about four sentences' worth of text.

It's an odd kind of minimalism that contains so much cruft.

EDIT: I'm refering to the parent link, the material.io site.

I'm seeing only 156KB for the entire page+assets. The logo is SVG and the CSS is minified. Where are you seeing the additional data?

Sorry, click on the parent domain (the top corner link).

Other folks are looking at the material.io site as well. It's no where close to 5mb, it's < 150kb.

Here's my chrome network panel: http://i.imgur.com/kUqttf3.png

That screenshot is for material.io/components. Look at material.io.

Ah, my apologies. It wasn't clear because you originally referred to "four lines of text", and the marerial.io site has got about a dozen links and animations, but I do get your point.

It's still significantly closer to 800kb than 5mb, though: http://i.imgur.com/0fuGPwj.png

(I'm sure there's a better way to get the full size of the site than looking at all the requests and eyeballing the sum...)

>I'm sure there's a better way to get the full size of the site than looking at all the requests and eyeballing the sum...

It'll say the total in the bottom left corner of the network tab. 42 requests | 782 KB transferred.

112k here for a fresh load (no caching).

14 sentences!

Is it just me, doesn't the Material seem kind of ..boring? Why is it coming out of a company with mediocre track record of UI design? Name one website from Google that actual looks nice and pretty.

I think any UI framework, once it's popular, is boring.

Popular, maybe, but it is undoubtedly boring from UI perspective.

Google Drive?

Instructions to view the demos of material-components-web: https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

Took me a while to find. It would be nice if this worked: https://rawgit.com/material-components/material-components-w...

So which Material Design library is the one to use? Or does it depend on if I use angular / react or even bootstrap?

Looks like there are four frameworks[0]. Use the Android one for Android, the Polymer one for Polymer, the Angular one for Angular, and the "Material Design Lite" would have to be adapted for everything else - it is plain css, html. Don't know if the Material Design Lite has any JavaScript library.

[0]https://design.google.com/resources/

MDL includes a JS library and it seems that there is a complete rewrite underway at the moment.

In fact: https://github.com/google/material-design-lite/tree/master

Yes, it appears that the web version of these new Material Components is considered the successor to MDL.

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

I hate if I start using a lib, which is kind of half finished and then learn a few month later that work on this project has been stopped and I should use now the new shiny fade of the day successor which is also half finished. Seems to be the standard in the JS world where people change frameworks and libs more often then their underpants.

Is there a suggested version for react? I know there are react versions out there, but I haven't had the time to look into them.

> Then simply include the correct files, write some HTML, and call mdc.autoInit() within a closing <script> tag.

Why on earth do we need JS involved in what should be some simple HTML / CSS?

MD often involves a fair bit of animation.

If you look at the individual components, though [1], most of them (like cards) actually have no associated JS at all.

Most of the other components, like the TextField (which includes JS to have things like the placeholder text swoop to a mini version above the field once you start typing) have gracefully-degrading versions. Not all of them do, however.

1. https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

the usual thing in other MD HTML frameworks is the ripple effect on buttons, and a few others. it's upsetting but legitimate

https://material.io/ has completely janky scrolling behavior in Firefox 50 on a 2015 MBP. Unacceptable

i too wish they had a demo page.

it's been 10 years since i worked on a web front end. i was just researched building a web based material design app this past 7 days. here is what i found...

    https://getmdl.io/ (mentioned earlier)
    http://posva.net/vue-mdl/
    http://appcomponents.org/material-components/#!/
    https://josephuspaye.github.io/Keen-UI/ (great UI, but uses vue 1.0)
    https://vuematerial.github.io/ (picked this in the end, works with vuejs 2)

i recommend using

    https://getmdl.io/
    OR
    https://vuematerial.github.io/

<rant> Now for some unsolicited venting...

i wish most web component/js/css/library/helpers in the wild - stuck to html or javascript markup explanation and loosely coupled the templating, bundling & tooling. Instead we have script injection with 3-4 levels of tooling, overhead & magic that is so convoluted & so prone to being out-dated every month - it's depressing.

i'm building the backend in Go - and just wanted to be able to have markup. But i've been stumbling on js libraries intended to run on webpags but requiring tools across nodejs, coffescript, ruby and a dangerous new trend - a web library tighly coupled with their server-side counterpart that basically spits out html/js. so the server sends out js/html to your user - that then makes another request to the server to replace itself with the final html. They call it server-side rendering. WTF!

Was finally able to get components working with just 1 js file(vuejs), bootstrap css customized to only have minimal grid css, and a google font file.

If you like me - have been away from front end frameworks and want to build material UI like web components - check out this article that finally explained what these 101 frameworks on github and in the wild are actually doing to your html

    https://coligo.io/vuejs-components/

After reading ^ i was able to create my own abstractions using getmdl.io or vuematerial's components like - <searchbox />, <login />, <searchbar />.

Also i'm loving http://vuejs.org (my pick against react/backbone/angular/ember - all of whom have a steeper learning curve)

</rant>

a functional programmer working on an internal admin webapp with material design

Trust Google to have such an uninspiring design.

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