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Comment by virgil_disgr4ce | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of a purely (would it really be, though?) declarative UI paradigm, but this particular post offers very little. What other attempts at declarative UI on the web have been taken, beyond just bits and pieces of an otherwise imperative framework?

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Can't tell if this is an especially dry joke or not, but HTML

I think maybe HTML-as-content is declarative, but HTML-as-layout is mostly imperative. I would expect a constraint-solving engine in any declarative layout system. Tables have some minor constraint solving capabilities... So of course we do our best to never use them for layout! Flexbox was definitely a step in the right direction.

I've talked before about an idea to split layout into a new technology, freeing HTML and CSS to only consider content and presentation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13536585

Yes, but the smallest amount of behavior requires the imperative-by-default javascript, and the design is in pratice decided by the results of the interference of two different declarative languages (HTML + CSS).

It's not the simplest or clearest thing around.

I meant declaring the UI interactions as well as the content structure

React/Vuejs components are declarative UI at their core. That idea tends to get lost in the soup that is state management, but it is there.

The easiest-to-integrate React/Vuejs components are very close to purely declarative, in my experience.

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