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Comment by rolha-capoeira | Hacker News Reader

Don't make any assumptions about the end-user (developer). I've tried many web UI kits and ditched many because they got in the way.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to include the modules and see no immediate effect — completely opt-in. I could first opt-in to the basic styling via a class on the body tag. Then I could opt-in to other components via classes and specific structures. Namespacing the CSS classes would be great, too, so there's little chance of colliding with my custom CSS [first-party, first-class] classes [that I shouldn't have to namespace].

The web UI kit I'm using now that comes closest to this ideal for me is https://getuikit.com/.

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Thank you, I'll surely keep flexibility in mind. However, don't you think UI kits are meant to do the most of the job for the developer and should not require any additional work on your side? (as long as it does not interfere with your stack ofc)

I suppose that depends on what type of user you're targeting. I'm a front-end engineer, not a designer, so I want to be able to smoothly integrate with tools with minimal conflicts. I don't think it's asking too much of a user to add a class to the body. Consider that even if you're targeting non-programmers (designers), they will still customize the UI on top of your library and therefore know how to add a class to a tag.

On the other hand, I've tried somewhat- or very-opinionated UI kits and if there was something I didn't like or want to use, I had to find a way to opt-out, which was always ugly and not sustainable.

Additionally, this helps semantics and readability, and helps keep things scoped. What if I want to use your UI kit in a subsection of my document but not the whole thing?

To me, that is the holy grail of UI kits.

That's a view worth keeping in mind. Does the kit you have mentioned above work for you in that way?

No, but it's the closest I've seen yet. It applies some pretty tame styles on inclusion, and every class is namespaced.

I'll sure take a closer look at how it feels and works. Thank you. Feel free to join the waiting list - I'd love to hear a feedback from you on the first version.

Done!

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