Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

paulmakeswebsites.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 351 posts

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#51

Post by yellow_lead »

benrutter wrote: post #22

This radio selection is brilliant silly, especially because the end result is indecipherable from a vanilla css rqdio button. For some reason people keep going back to complex UI and interactivity frameworks though, does anyone have a good example of a large website built without all this bloat? Asking because I've seen hundreds of small sites built with elegance and simplicity, and few large ones. Is it just inevita…

> does anyone have a good example of a large website built without all this bloat?

How about this one?

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#52

Post by ehnto »

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 someone knows is React or other frameworks, things get overengineered. They didn't realise it could be so much simpler if they just knocked it back a layer instead of climbing higher and higher.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#53

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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…

Worse still is the misunderstanding that React is simple. It’s an endless stream of cache invalidation bugs. Linters are getting better at catching these. But they also have false positives.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#55

Post by teaearlgraycold »

yellow_lead wrote: post #51
benrutter wrote: post #22

This radio selection is brilliant silly, especially because the end result is indecipherable from a vanilla css rqdio button. For some reason people keep going back to complex UI and interactivity frameworks though, does anyone have a good example of a large website built without all this bloat? Asking because I've seen hundreds of small sites built with elegance and simplicity, and few large ones. Is it just inevita…

> does anyone have a good example of a large website built without all this bloat? How about this one?

Don’t think it counts

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#56

Post by chrismorgan »

Alupis wrote: post #23
leoff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. OP fails to understand that there are reasons why it was done this way, and that someone who spent thousand of hours working on this might know something that they don't.

Perhaps this is the original PR for the Radio/RadioGroup[1]. It does seem the complexity was a deliberate decision. [1] https://github.com/radix-ui/primitives/pull/121

Half of that complexity springs from the requirement of being able to put any element as the radio button. If you’re willing to say “you can only use anything that can be expressed with CSS applied to the , including psuedoelements” (which is plenty for thing like shadcn), it melts away.

The other half of it looks to come from an overloaded Label component which should probably have been split into two. There’s a reason that HTML has and as different things. The implementation is also trivially incorrect: role=label isn’t a thing. Other parts of it are wrong or dubious too. In general, if the HTML way of expressing something isn’t permitted, the ARIA way of expressing the same thing is probably wrong too.

And so it goes, through the entire system. They assume you might want something ridiculously complex, and so they complicate and make worse the normal case.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#57

Post by curtisblaine »

Surac wrote: post #30

Im not in web development. Reading this article makes me think: is it realy neccersary to use all those complex frameworks? Isn't html/css enough? People always say "every line not written can't be a bug" but moving those lines into a library was not the idea behind the words

> Isn't html/css enough?

No, obviously. If you are writing complex web applications with state, local processing of data and asynchronous interactions it's not enough. You need javascript. If your javascript is especially complex and you desire it to be declarative, you probably need a framework. Do you need, I don't know, Tomcat in Java? Probably yes for a complex application and no for a simple proof of concept. Do you need a database? Aren't files enough? And so on.

Shadcn is a framework for developers who develop highly interactive web apps. If all you need is a static form that submits data to a web service, you probably don't need a framework (except when you need it - for example, selects are not yet fully styleable in all browsers).

Next objection usually is: do you need complex apps on the client? Can't they be reduced to a series of simple forms controlled by the server? Sometimes they can and sometimes they can't, but of course I will decide the shape, behaviour, complexity and look of the applications I build (or have others build for me), thank you very much.

That said, radio buttons have been styleable in all non-legacy browsers for at least 5-6 years, there's no excuse for rewriting them from scratch with svgs.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#58

Post by hahahahhaah »

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…

The problem is app-document impedence mismatch. CSS makes stuff easier but for doc-like pages. In addition doc-like pages want some app-like niceness too.

If you need to be an app you usually need a framework to stay sane (evidence: most other native UI kits are frameworks of some sort) and thus React etc. But they want full contol. Thus 2 ways to do a radio etc.

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#59

Post by hu3 »

benrutter wrote: post #22

This radio selection is brilliant silly, especially because the end result is indecipherable from a vanilla css rqdio button. For some reason people keep going back to complex UI and interactivity frameworks though, does anyone have a good example of a large website built without all this bloat? Asking because I've seen hundreds of small sites built with elegance and simplicity, and few large ones. Is it just inevita…

https://www.mcmaster.com

2022 post about it. 1400 points. ~500 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978

Re: The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

#60

Post by dagss »

I am pretty new to frontend development (but have 20 years of backend)

I assumed I would need to use one of these libraries at some point. But, perhaps since I am using Svelte instead of React, whenever I ask AI to do something, then since I don't already use a component lib it just spits out the HTML/CSS/TS to do the job from scratch (or, depending on how you look at it, output the mean component from its training data).

I have to point out it should organize the code and give the component a dedicated Svelte file (sure I could fix AGENTS md to do that).

I think with AI the usecase for these libraries is much lower. If there is anything complex you need AI can build it in some seconds specifically tailored for you, so..

Post reply on HN