Remix – A framework focused on web fundamentals and modern UX

The problem with suffering from a lack of imagination is you don't know you suffer from a lack of imagination.

The entirety of your comment is devoted to the current and past state of things. JSX is better because "template languages suck ass". You need to "render a h1 or div" to "draw...on a web page" or "add an element to the DOM", etc.

So, you're championing one approach because you think it's better than everything else that already exists. That's the definition of a lack of imagination.

>Putting another abstraction layer over it to obscure it does jack shit other than make your code more complicated.

I doubt you appreciate how many layers of abstraction already exist. But, per your logic we should all be writing assembly code.

You have it exactly backwards. There's no reason HTML has to be the target simply because that's what the browser currently consumes. If, tomorrow, browsers "natively" consumed something that was less document-oriented and more idiomatically app-appropriate, then will you understand? Would you be comfortable with coding to that abstraction level? Because everything you touch is essentially running in a VM. These frameworks could easily provide that layer versus the one they provide.

So try to get HTML and other "web fundamentals" unstuck from your brain. Imagine languages and platforms for building non-Web (e.g. native) applications and perhaps that will help open your mind a bit.

Imagine.

In any case, thanks for the comment versus just a silent downvote. FWIW, I upvoted you for that, even though your comment was poorly considered.

More like a few years early. Bookmark this. If you think JSX and screwing around with HTML-in-code is as good as it gets, you'll be laughing at your comment in a few years.

BTW, I've been saying this since encountering the then-loved awfulness that was Angular 2.

>JSX has been a thing for so long now and it works.

That's a pretty spectacular statement — sort of a rallying cry template for never innovating on anything again. Just substitute anything you prefer for JSX.

I think I dramatically understated the situation when I said there was a lack of imagination.

But of all the things that need improving in the UI world, the templating itself is quite low down on my list of priorities.

Next allows you to compile the "static assets" and put them on a "dumb" CDN like say a typical Rails application. I don't think Remix supports this pattern at this time, but again, it does work with a perfectly reasonable alternative.

>It seems like you're conflating a few different concerns here:

>Those are all entirely different questions and concerns.

What you're picking up on is that I'm talking about all of it, as my call is for a completely new paradigm, which necessarily upends everything. As such, these are not "entirely different concerns". They are tightly coupled concerns.

So, to your points, respectively:

1. Yes. JSX is flawed (for a different reason)*.

2. Yes. We should be building graphically

3. Yes. The tooling should reflect the paradigm

4. N/A. We shouldn't care about the underlying display layer (perhaps the most meaningful point)

5. Yes. It makes sense to run in the browser because ubiquity and standards. But a lightweight "VM" that translates from a more idiomatically suitable mental model/coding approach to raw web standards can be used to insulate us from thinking in HTML.

*JSX is flawed not by its design, but by the problem it's trying to address. That problem is emblematic of outdated, low-level thinking. I'm trying to push the discussion up a layer or two: that is, there is no need for a webdev to ever type an angled bracket.

Anyone who has ever worked in an app-building environment that's purpose-built for creating apps should look at that return statement in my comment at the top of this subthread and think "What the?".

So, again, if you're not seeing it, then one approach is to think Java Swing or similar for building web apps. And, it doesn't just end at a GUI builder. From event processing to component bindings, we should be dealing with higher level concepts, not web stuff like HTML-ish templates (irrespective of whether we rename them to **X because they're mixed with code and delivered via return statements).

Sure, there'll be times when you need an escape hatch to target lower-level constructs. But these should be rare and, even then, the available API should allow us to target these with clean idioms, not:

x = ''

If you're still not seeing it, I can guarantee you that in a couple of years we're going to have something much more akin to what I'm talking about. Maybe it'll be delivered via one of the low-code platforms or similar. JSX and the React-ish frameworks will soon-after be dead, or perhaps these environments will generate something akin to it on our behalf. I really don't care if React, et. al. get a second-life as compiler output. And, that's the point.