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The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

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Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#181

Post by curtisblaine »

christophilus wrote: post #166
dreadnip wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most web apps are a combination of static pages, simple forms and highly interactive content though. That's what makes the choice so hard.

That’s why I use React, though. It’s much nicer (as a developer— not necessarily UX) to have a single paradigm and approach to building your app vs using one approach for the simple pages and a different approach for the handful of highly interactive pages. Inevitably, your simple pages get complex interactive edge cases and you wish you’d written those in React from the start, etc. I know many will disagree with me…

No, you're right. Livewire, Phoenix LiveView and all the others are a couple levels removed from the browser and you have to suffer the whole indirection chain when something goes wrong. React is a good compromise - it still has indirection, but not so much, and it's much easier to use at scale than state managing and direct DOM manipulation.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#182

Post by thiht »

tmvnty wrote: post #153

So for a React developer who doesn't want to include Shadcn/Radix, but also doesn't have time to build every component/a11y/compat/edge cases from scratch, what are the better alternatives? Would be nice to list them here so developers can know a midpoint between DIY Shadcn/Radix

You don't want to build your own components but you also don't want to use pre-made components? At some point you have to pick one. If you really want a midpoint, it's literally Radix: behaviours are done, stylings are up to you

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#183

Post by elias1233 »

These comments don’t seem to have that much love for shadcn, which is unfortunate as I think it promotes good component file structure and reuse. The premise is that you could (and should) change the components yourself, as they are living in your code base and ”owned” by you, which is a radically different approach compared to other ui libraries.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#184

Post by hombre_fatal »

tmvnty wrote: post #153

So for a React developer who doesn't want to include Shadcn/Radix, but also doesn't have time to build every component/a11y/compat/edge cases from scratch, what are the better alternatives? Would be nice to list them here so developers can know a midpoint between DIY Shadcn/Radix

One midpoint is traditional css frameworks like https://getbootstrap.com/.

Not as powerful, and you don't get this sweet 3rd-party pluggable component catalog, but it's much simpler and it's stable: there's no constantly evolving ecosystem.

Shadcn ecosystem might have calmed down by now, but when I used it years ago, the layers on top of it were super unstable, and I was annoyed every time I have to work on those projects until I got Opus 4.5 to refactor out of them.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#185

Post by rune-dev »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #144
ediatedia wrote: post #85

Ok, I'll bite. I've been coding for almost 25 years so have seen various things come and go, so hopefully have a bit of capital in the bank. Don't get me wrong, a HTML5 radio button is a beautiful thing, and sometimes React is a hammer and everything is a nail. However, I think something that OP doesn't mention super explicitly in their post is the codebase they are working on is probably a React codebase. React is a…

As someone who has never really dived into React etc., my main question is "where is the line?" I'm sure you'll agree that React is overkill for some applications and, for the sake of this discussion, I'll agree that it's beneficial for applications beyond a certain complexity. But where exactly (or even, roughly) does that line lie? A basic CRUD app? Surely not. A calculator? I'm guessing "no". Bluesky? Maybe/probab…

Bluesky absolutely yes, something like React makes sense.

I think it depends on a few things but the two big ones in my mind are:

1) Interactivity. How rich do you need/want the interactivity to be? As this scales up the benefit of React also increases.

Of course you can get highly interactive vanilla HTML sites but it’s much easier to achieve with React.

2) Statefulness. The more UI state you have the more a tool like React helps you. Again, it’s not doing anything you cannot do with vanilla HTML/JS but the level of difficulty comparatively is night and day.

On top of that, React is widely adopted. The tooling is fantastic, the community is strong, the job prospects are very good, and if you’re hiring the talent pool for React is vast.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#186

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

I see this with a bunch of python libraries too.

I imagine for some usecase, they are valuable. However, when reading advice on the internet you get comments from people that tell you what technology they used without consideration of the overhead required to use this technology and the problem at hand.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#188

Post by cztomsik »

christophilus wrote: post #160
ehnto wrote: post #52

I don't touch frontend very often anymore, but you could see the writing on the wall for complexity when React took over and newer devs were working exclusively in that abstraction. Unlike other abstractions where things get tidied up and more simple, React is much more complex than the technology it's building on. Necessarily, to enable it's features, but none the less it is a consequence of this that when all someo…

I guess it depends on your definition of complexity. Being able to think about your UI as a function of state is a lot simpler than dealing with mutability, coordinating imperative updates all over the place, etc. React’s core idea is simpler than the paradigms it replaced. By simple, I mean as in “Simple Made Easy”[0]. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4&pp=ygUQc2ltcGxlIG1...

React is not simple (preact is) and what's worse, it gets more and more overengineered in order to solve the problems they have themselves created (accidental complexity in your video).

Sadly, accidental complexity is a common theme among react devs, not just ui libs, but also react-router, redux, redux-form, even tanstack useQuery() is way over-engineered and the core idea can be implemented in Maybe that's the biggest issue after all, people being lazy, expecting to do npm install and being able to reuse everything in any situation. Except that it almost never work like that and a lot of damage is done in the name of it...

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#190

Post by sorahn »

stavros wrote: post #174
sorahn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is specifically a react problem. The problem is that people don't want to learn what modern CSS can do, or write it themselves (see Tailwind), and most new frameworks make it easy to just sidestep that with div soup. Some of us _like_ CSS, and try to use as much of it when possible, but I feel like we are few and far between. I use react to manage the state of my app, but that doesn't mean I have t…

I really don't understand Tailwind. I heard great things about it, and then I tried it and it seemed like setting style="" on all elements, but with extra steps. Did we go off semantic CSS and returned to setting properties on each element, or was I using it wrong?

If you're experienced with or like the way CSS works, and you didn't like Tailwind, then you were probably using it correctly.
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