Comment by nwienert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwienert | Hacker News Reader

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No one believes the gospel of syntax, simplicity, and inline styles more than me [0]. I made that before Svelte was a thing and the Vue creator actually asked if he could borrow multiple ideas from that as he was making it.

But idk what React codebases you've been in, the bog-standard, overwhelmingly popular bootstraps and guides since way before Svelte ever existed had some pretty nice style solutions and at the minimum importing CSS.

React has some of the most gorgeous style solutions around (I should know having built the best one) and has since forever ago. Svelte is less popular than many React starter kits with I'd argue much nicer DX.

CSS needed drastic changing too, and I think if you looked on average total CSS knowledge is higher than ever, you're just seeing frontend become popular and wide, different types of sub-specialties at this point.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=HHTYHm6qLFY&t=19

> React has some of the most gorgeous style solutions around

Can you give an example?

> But idk what React codebases you've been in, the bog-standard, overwhelmingly popular bootstraps and guides since way before Svelte ever existed had some pretty nice style solutions and at the minimum importing CSS.

Vast majority use Styled Components or another flavor of CSS-in-JS that continues the problem of making it harder for HTML/CSS experts to contribute to a JS-only codebase. Tamagui is exactly the issue I'm talking about. It's great for JS/React first devs, but doesn't actually do that much that a good HTML/CSS developer couldn't do without all this added tooling and with much easier to read clean code for people unfamiliar with the framework.

> I think if you looked on average total CSS knowledge is higher than ever,

Definitely not my experience. There are some great CSS devs out there, but it is always secondary to the skillsets that are actually highly paid (JS, React) and they mostly end up in large companies by happenstance of those companies hiring more people. Smaller tech companies make the consistent mistake of not hiring front-of-the-front-end devs and end up with poor UI and experiences because of it.

Vast majority use CSS modules or tailwind.

Tamagui is explicitly React Native and Web focused so yea you don’t learn CSS as directly, but that’s the point as there’s no CSS on native. It’s not really relevant since Svelte doesn’t do native (big downside and shows why maybe CSS extremism is not helpful).

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