Microsoft Fast Design

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?

I love seeing a wider adoption of webcomponents, but I have some complaints about this library, mainly because they're really pushing the whole, "lightweight and low memory" lines.

Take a look at the accordian component (the very first one in their system) and check it out in the dom inspector - it has a shadowroot that has precisely one child: a element. In this situation a shadowroot does nothing to help. All it means is instead of just creating children for the element, you have to create them and add "slot='item'" to all of them. Shadowroots are great when you need encapsulation of styles or static non-content UI, but with this outer element neither of those are true. There isn't any additional UI, nor styles. This is something I see a lot in lazy libraries - they automatically create a separate dom tree even if it isn't needed whatsoever.

This tells me either the library requires this every time (going against the "lightweight / low memory" motto), or the developer for this one didn't have enough understanding of when to use shadowroots.

That's not to say this is all bad though - their design system tokens are really nice and provide a lot of flexibility. I'll probably emulate a lot of them for the next webcomponent based design system I'm working on. Their algorithmic color palettes are interesting, but so far I've never found a solid algorithmic color generator - color is simply too tied to trends and too subjective to be algorithmically made. Curious to see it work in practice, and a shame they don't provide examples of it.

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?

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?