I think the better question is, "Will front end development ever move away from CSS?"
In all honesty though, with ES6/7 writing programs in Javascript is a joy. CSS still sucks...
In all honesty though, with ES6/7 writing programs in Javascript is a joy. CSS still sucks...
The first project I worked on where I was able to isolate all my styles by component was eye opening. It becomes less like CSS and more like Androids XML styling.
Can you expand? Which libraries, I know BEM hopes to isolate CSS styles to "components" by using strict CSS rules, but are you speaking of inline styles as they relate to JavaScript libraries like React?
Not all of them use inline styles and a lot are library agnostic. Here are just some of the ones I have played with, plenty more exist.
https://github.com/rofrischmann/fela
https://github.com/FormidableLabs/radium
https://github.com/Khan/aphrodite
https://github.com/threepointone/glamor
https://github.com/MicheleBertoli/css-in-js
https://github.com/styled-components/styled-components
https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules
https://github.com/cssinjs/jss
Unlike with desktop apps, everybody pretty much builds everything in the UI for themselves, with the exception of a handful of primitive items (button, radio-button, text-field, etc) that people still re-implement anyway.
If there was a set of rich widgets to just take, configure and use in your JS app, like you can in Cocoa, Windows Forms, etc, it would be great. And no, React is not that.
It feels like many people who argue against these things are only the ones using them not the ones developing them or actively interacting with the repercussions of those developments.
It's a completely different world when you're creating something and using something.
One person might use that thing vastly different than how you would and the repercussions of their implementation can do a lot of damage to others.
Something to keep in mind.
The web implementations doesn't follow some inherent constraints of UIs, they are designed this (bad) way because they need to work with the pile-up of hacks upon hacks, and design by committee that is the web stack.
JS, for example, is not bad because there were some great domain constraints -- it's bad because as it's creator says, he had a tight deadline to go create it, alone, in a couple of weeks -- and had a design spec to make it look like Java as much as possible too.
CSS is not bad because layout is inherently difficult. It's bad because it started like a pure styling solution, and all kinds of hacks were piled to make it useful for layout (abusing the floating functionality, which was not meant as a layout solution). It took 20+ years to get to CSS Flex and Grid layout -- features that have been in desktop UI libs since forever...
And if forms have seen any love from the beginning, we'd have things like inter-changable re-usable components 20+ years ago, without the BS that is Web Components and the extra hacks like Shadow Dom etc. But they didn't even bother to add a few standard widgets like calendar in all those decades.
Not as broad reaching as JS/CSS/HTML.
> The web implementations doesn't follow some inherent constraints of UIs, they are designed this (bad) way because they need to work with the pile-up of hacks upon hacks, and design by committee that is the web stack.
They were made to fit the growing needs and have done remarkably so.
> JS, for example, is not bad because there were some great domain constraints -- it's bad because as it's creator says, he had a tight deadline to go create it, alone, in a couple of weeks -- and had a design spec to make it look like Java as much as possible too.
Doesn't make it bad. Made it lean, portable, ultimately an easy to use language. There have been many languages in the browser.
> CSS is not bad because layout is inherently difficult. It's bad because it started like a pure styling solution, and all kinds of hacks were piled to make it useful for layout (abusing the floating functionality, which was not meant as a layout solution). It took 20+ years to get to CSS Flex and Grid layout -- features that have been in desktop UI libs since forever...
Progressive enhancement is a large part of software engineering and doesn't make something bad. Users of software abusing the software doesn't make the software or implementation bad either, they simply are adopting to the situation they are in.
Yep, and the result of those libraries and implementations gave us what we have now across not just a single platform but multiple platforms and distribution models. Modern achievements.
> And if forms have seen any love from the beginning, we'd have things like inter-changable re-usable components 20+ years ago, without the BS that is Web Components and the extra hacks like Shadow Dom etc. But they didn't even bother to add a few standard widgets like calendar in all those decades.
Except, you can do those things, and that does exist. Just check out bootstrap v4 it has html5 calendar support, just off the top of my head.
Shadow dom was an experimental phase to improve performance, it worked out, taught a lot of engineers a lot about not just Javascript & DOM but the browser, it brought about a lot of beneficial tooling and lead to Native applications.
We had interchangeable components for a very long time, riding on bleeding edge doesn't change that fact.