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Comment by gunshowmo | Hacker News Reader

I definitely understand the frustration towards the growing ecosystem of web app technologies, but I think people really disregard the necessity of the complexity.

There are certain things that basic HTML/CSS simply cannot do, or if it can, does so in a very hacky way. For basic websites, you can absolutely get away with more basic templating, but as soon as you enter the territory of clean looking UI components that are both visibly appealing and functional, you are basically required to implement the complexity somewhere the choice of framework then is just determining how you want to structure that complexity. When you try to make a performant web application with a lot of interconnected, moving parts, the reason for a lot of the "bloat" becomes very apparent.

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At what level does “clean looking ui” overtake unnecessary complexity

Sometimes clean looking UI requires complexity.

If I need to let a user sort a list of items, is it more UI/UX friendly to make them press a button multiple times until an item is in the right place, or is it better to let them click and drag the item to the right part of the list?

The latter requires a lot more work but makes the experience a lot smoother.

You have one other option, the most difficult of all, to eliminate the use case.

Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. -Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I highly encourage you to look at a picture of the inside of an airplane cockpit.

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