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Comment by duopixel | Hacker News Reader

Check out the FAST Component explorer to see it in action: https://explore.fast.design/

Looks very flexible but the presentation and default design is horrible.

I would imagine the design convention is to show a + when you have more content hidden, and a - to indicate you can hide (minimize) it.

Is that the popular consensus, or is that an odd way of looking at it?

Yeah, this threw me as well, it is implemented incorrectly..

The accordion tag doesn't make any assumptions about icons. You can use smiley faces & frowny faces for open and closed if you prefer, or you can use plus and minus signs in either order or anything else.

The bigger more systemic documentation issue is the examples pages lack a view example source mode so there isn't an easy way to discover that icons are a user choice thing rather than a prebuilt styling thing.

The default design looks awful, especially on phone. I’m not a frontend dev, but I don’t see any reason why would I use this instead of, for example, Bootstrap for sideprojects. Can some FE comment on the project usefulness? Why go with Fast?

The impression I get is FAST is trying to simplify the markup you see in for instance Bootstrap's documentation by trying to build standard components that Bootstrap themselves could use (or Material or their own Fluent stuff). The emphasis is on a lot of the little things in Bootstrap's documentation that doesn't either get copy/pasted or it gets copy and pasted and ignored/forgotten/left-to-bit-rot. Stuff like aria- tags for accessibility. Seems the idea here is that by baking them into web components that do most of the work for you they are less likely to be forgotten or left to bit-rot.

(I'm not a front end dev myself, but do enough full stack to think I know what is going on here.)

I maintain an alternative web component library, and this is the Bootstrap comparison I like to use. [1]

The API is easier, there’s less markup, and less room for error. A well-designed component also bakes in accessibility and provides encapsulation so your own styles and behaviors won’t leak in.

It’s a way better dev experience.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/hypdzz/comment/...

On desktop all of it looks like they either didn't do any styling, so I can hardly tell I'm not looking at unstyled HTML (lots of the static elements) or what they did is pretty bad-looking (everything else). Is this representative of the work, or is this presentation just weirdly bad for some reason? What's good about it? What am I missing?

Strange how the switch uses the default arrow cursor and the checkbox uses the pointer, while neither have a hover effects, but the other form elements and interactive components all have hover/active effects.

There might be some interesting base stuff underneath but the UI/design part is pretty barebones and meh. Maybe that's not the point?

> the presentation and default design is horrible

Yes, many of the interactive elements look static. Anything built with this design would be very hard to use. And, as others have said, the accordion +/- buttons are reversed.

default design is horrible

Good. That will encourage people to change it.

How is that good? If they make it have good design then people don't have to try to make it good (and often fail).

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