Instead it could really use a lot more explanation on how it works. If you make comparisons make sure they are fair. The image "JavaScript mixed together" and "Strict separation of concerns" is just comparing apples with oranges. Multiple times in the docs it compares a huge complicated JSX like component and replaces it with 3 lines of html and 3 lines of css. I don't believe that it does the same thing.
Some of the claims are strange. It praises standard HTML but apparently you have to use some custom Markdown syntax to write it. How does that add up? And on top of that it also introduces new syntax for loops and variables.
This could all work perfectly fine. But my suggestion would be to talk more about how it works and what are the advantages and less trying to bring down competitors. It could use less grand claims and focus more on what it really does.
I've seen my fair share of React code, and the code he is displaying is definitely idiomatic React.
> It could use less grand claims and focus more on what it really does.
Agreed. While I appreciate that a rationale is needed for something like this, I think his presentation of the rationale was far too verbose compared to diving into some code.
Maybe I'm not the target - I would have preferred more code and less pontificating, because I 'noped right out of React and others. What I have as a replacement in standard JS, HTML and CSS is unsatisfying to me.
It's really not. There's nothing, for example, stopping you from using <dialog> in React. It works perfectly fine and can integrate with any state or event manager if you want it to.
What he's doing is comparing brand-new web features that don't have good support yet with long-standing solutions that were needed years before those web features were a glimmer in anyone's eye.
> It's really not.
Of the React projects I've seen (including a ton on github), none of them used the browsers dialog without a React wrapper.
A quick search on google for a React project using `<dialog>` found none. Similar for github.
If you have an example, I'd like to see a link, because I'm skeptical that React projects are using `<dialog>` without wrapping it in React.
const Modal = ({ isOpen, onRequestClose, ...rest }: ComponentProps<"dialog"> & { isOpen: boolean; onRequestClose: () => unknown; }) => {
const dialogRef = useRef<HTMLDialogElement>(null);
useLayoutEffect(() => {
if (isOpen) {
dialogRef.current?.showModal();
} else {
dialogRef.current?.close();
}
}, [isOpen]);
return (
<dialog
ref={dialogRef}
onClose={(e) => {
e.preventDefault();
onRequestClose();
}}
{...rest}
/>
);Uhm I found some 37-odd thousand results
https://github.com/search?q=%2F%28%3F-i%29%3Cdialog%2F+%28pa...
Probably more out there but I kept the strict jsx/tsx extensions.
It's not fair to take these legacy patterns, which are what made React and friends so much better than the other options that were available at the time, and compare them to features that were specifically built with the intention of making those patterns no longer necessary.
Once those new features are supported on most devices (which again, they aren't in many cases) I'm excited to see them incorporated into code bases written in any framework.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/di...
What I mean React and other frameworks went with mixing concerns because of reasons that were practical - for example realization that usually one dev implements HTML and JS code in one task, not like article comes up with designers and devs. In reality lots of designers don’t live in agile sprints and the same repositories as devs there is huge impedance mismatch.
Components have won for a reason - for any given web-based UI component to work it needs to render HTML, to style that HTML, and logic for rendering and behavior. So HTML, CSS, and JS.
It only makes sense to colocate those things so that they're easier to build, understand, distribute, and use as a unit. Often times they're not even separable as the HTML depends on state and logic, etc.
And the weird thing is that any other UI platform has components that combine rendering, styles, and logic together and no-one bats an eye because it would be very odd and cumbersome to do it any other way, but on the web some people think components are bad. And they tend to provide no realistic mechanism for reuse except to use an external system.
The "separation of concerns" is often misunderstood, and historically people were treating html, css and js like they were completely separate beings, which is of course a recipe for disaster [0].
However, what I'd like to see is separation between logic and presentation. In React world people used to call them dumb and smart components. Then you can use stuff like storybook to gauge your layout before applying "business logic" to the application. On top of that you have an easy way to test your "smart" components.
[0] like that time when I saw an org that decided to be "cloud agnostic" and people started pushing their own databases and http servers to AWS. :)
If you look at website as an application components are valid approach.
I don’t need a framework to make documents - I need framework to make web applications that is why components won so I agree.
Usually one does not design a page like website but reusable components that will have its own context and content.
Designer might focus on broad scope how stuff fits in a web app.
That pop-up to edit “task” has to behave the same on 20 different views.
Widget showing task details will probably be integrated also in some far removed place.
That is whole different game that this “standards focused framework” is not addressing and that game was addressed by whole bunch of frameworks that this article nags about.
How Nue works is _extensively_ documented:
Most of these questions are also addressed in the FAQ:
https://nuejs.org/docs/faq.html
THe Markdown claim is also explained multiple times on this discussion
And, while on the subject of tone: this is not a very effective way to receive constructive criticism. I had exactly the same reaction as OP, as did apparently a lot of upvoters. Communication is a two-way street, but when a significant number of people misunderstand you or can't find the information that you think you put out there, it would be worth listening to them to figure out what you could do to better communicate.
In the end, most people wouldn't even notice or care if they didn't fully appreciate your project— you are the one who is invested in people appreciating it, so it's up to you to take responsibility for the way in which it's communicated. It's not useful to blame other people for failing to understand your docs.
You've done this gluing, sure, but surely at a cost to flexibility. You also didn't even glue, you just reimplemented the whole stack.
I wanted to give it a try, but I need to install bun, a new js runtime, okay fine, why not. Javascript needs more runtimes after all.
Then I need to install `nuekit`.. globally.. Okay...
Now I need to run an obscure command 'nue; which I didn't know I installed. `nue create simple-blog`
Then it tells me to follow the tutorial docs, great. But I need to start writing YAML.. Losing patience now.
My relief comes when I see :
> Nue is not currently tested or developed under Windows, so use it at your own risk.
Well I guess as a Windows user I can't have a 'Standards First Web Framework'.
Think I'll stick to what actually works instead.
Windows causes so many problems for me in a full stack development role because people come in and have trouble installing things, etc. and nothing works properly.
I'm not surprised this app doesn't support Windows, I certainly wouldn't bother putting that time in myself. You can have a cross-env but everything else should just work or it's not my problem.
Python is tiny bit more challenging to install. .NET is lot less challenging for the most part but has a few Windows install "quirks" now due to the frozen version bundled with Windows. Both are generally great on Windows once properly installed.
Plenty of developers do full stack development on Windows. It's often extra work to break Windows development than to support it.
(Also yes, Ruby is terrible on Windows, Swift is getting better, try to use task runners that aren't (Ba)sh scripts.)
Node, Deno, and Bun, and all their contemporaries in other programming language ecosystems are targeting POSIX first, and then often times forcing those same APIs to behave the same way on Windows.
That's why. Most full stack web developers are not doing things in a Windows environment.
There's no such thing as POSIX. There have been a million different standards named POSIX. The only one that really mattered long-term commercially was "capable of being used for US Government projects" and that one both has and has not claimed Windows was "POSIX" in different decades. "Has a file system and a command line and is capable of running programs." Exciting standards stuff like that. Everyone who uses the term "POSIX" has a different definition in mind, in my experience.
> Most full stack web developers are not doing things in a Windows environment.
I think that depends as much on which part of the country you live in. There's a lot of "dark matter" developers doing boring full stack things on Windows. You might not see them, you might not care about them, doesn't mean they don't exist. Also the last straw poll I saw was something like a 50/50 split. I don't any side can claim "most". I do think that yes, the most visible web developer is the stereotype of the Bay Area macOS programmer with a hipster 'stache a near permanent chair in some coffee shop. I don't think that is most web developers in the general world.
There's literally a POSIX specification at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/
Do you seriously not think the people who author Node, et al aren't looking at POSIX, the C Standard Library, Linux, macOS, Windows and moving down the list in that order?
Where do you think all of `node:fs` comes from? Because I sure don't see GetFileAttributesEx there.
Or who could forget good old CreateDirectoryA? I guess Bun didn't get the memo.
As a side note, and not to excuse lack of Windows support, but: I've switched to WSL (Linux) for development on Windows. Coupled with Visual Studio Code, the results are much faster than when I used the Windows terminal directly.
Windows has had a Linux subsystem for years. This should not be an obstacle for you anymore.
Do I need npm or another utility? It probably stinks. Do I need to build something? It definitely stinks.
# Create a website
nue create simple-blog
With Lit you can build full apps with standard and plain JS, CSS, and HTML; standard web components; and no build tools.
I don't immediately see how this is any more standards-first, especially when it mentions Markdown, tooling, and a CLI. I don't actually really see what exactly this even is from this landing page. It would help to show something up front.
[1]: https://lit.dev
In my view, JSX will be the true legacy of React. Applications are code. Many frameworks (such as htmx) extend HTML to bring a bit of programmability into it; but I felt they were just framework-specific, non-standard rules to learn. JSX is more standardized, and isn't as framework dependent.
Shameless plug: Magic Loop [1], a Lit alternative (that nobody knows about) which uses WebJSX [2] underneath.
JSX has no semantics, only syntax. What a JSX expression means changes depending on the transform you use and the framework you use with it. Some JSX transforms produce values, some produce side-effects. Values produced with JSX under different transforms have different types and are not compatible with each other.
Maybe one day some form of JSX will be standardized, but until then tagged template literals work great with no tools and their behavior is fully determined by the template tag that you use, not an external transform. They're also more expressive than JSX (In Lit we support explicit attribute, property and event bindings rather than overload a single namespace for all 3).
Support for syntax highlighting, type-checking, and intellisense are available to IDEs via plugins and LSPs.
You're skipping the history of why it came to be.
When I started writing HTML, you needed excellently structured CSS because there were no components. So you needed .sidebar, .topbar, .button.ok etc. This was extremely hard to get right. We cannot see the future, and we cannot know what an application will become - figuring out a globally scoped css hierarchy was difficult even for very experienced developers.
Post 2010 (with frameworks like Backbone.js and Angular), people started splitting apps into components. This meant that the smallest unit of reusable design could be a component, instead of CSS classes and JS functions. Adoption of self-contained styling in components increased gradually after Bootstrap brought in utility classes, CSS-in-JS picked up, and Tailwind made it easier.
It made total sense of course, because the component is what you want to re-use. To address your point directly, tight coupling within a component is ok - maybe even a good thing. We did not get there without trying other ideas, we tried them for twenty years.
I'd say the big mind-shifts with React were the virtual DOM replacing things like progressive enhancement, and later with Next and server side components, the commingling of back-end and front-end, which is mostly a complicated solution to the problem already created by moving away from progressive enhancement.
Obviously that doesn't solve it for other IDEs, but back when TS and JSX and ES6 were new they had bad IDE support too.
[1]: https://medium.com/@jeswin/sailboat-a-modern-router-for-reac...
I can't say I completely love the OO aspect of it (notably the amount of boilerplate it requires to define props), and personally I think Lit would've been more powerful if it were optional for LitElements to be Web Components (having a million nested shadow DOMs by default is, well.. let's say it makes some common pragmatisms like global CSS overrides needlessly hard. also a single global namespace for tag names gets messy fast, and so on). But given the goals you set yourself, Lit is absolutely amazing. Small, fast, easy. Hats off!
But the issue is that Lit still approaches web development through the lens of components. While these components may be "standard" web components that encourages developers to keep bundling markup, styles, and behavior together rather than maintaining proper separation of concerns.
Nue takes a different approach by removing all the unnecessary layers between the developer and web standards. Where Next.js forces content into JavaScript components and requires complex build pipelines, Nue provides a more direct development experience built directly on HTML (layout), Markdown (content), vanilla CSS, and vanilla JavaScript.
With Nue HMR completes in milliseconds rather than seconds. The HMR spans css, content, data, and HTML-based server and client-compnents. CSS updates instantly through the native cascade instead of rebuilding components. The entire development feedback loop stays under 100ms, maintaining perfect flow while preserving document state.
Most importantly, this sort of standards-first architecture enables true systematic design trough vanilla CSS. Instead of coupling design decisions to components through utility classes or CSS-in-JS, with Nue you can build design systems directly with CSS variables, calc() and other modern goodies.
Why is this a problem? Reuse is incredibly important for building almost anything on the web, and it's been with us since long before the web platform supported it natively, e.g. with CGI scripts that used Perl functions, to output repeated HTML "components", or PHP, web frameworks, etc.
If you don't have some method of reuse in the platform or framework, developers either have to copy-and-paste (and deal with so many difficulties of updating and maintaining consistency that it's not a realistic option), or push reuse to a non-standard layer of the system like server templating.
Server templating is fine, but it doesn't actually get rid of the implicit concept of components that'll be in the page or app, it just disaggregates it among to non-colocated parts of the system.
Web components can be written in standard JS modules, loaded by or inlined into standard HTML, instantiated by standard custom element tags, rendered with the help of standard <template> elements, and styled with standard CSS.
If you don't use the web platform's native facilities for re-use, then you do have to use some non-web-standard system, like a server framework. Is there some way you see that that's more standard than the web?
Your Markdown- based content generates semantic HTML. Your styling is pure CSS with modern features like nesting and container queries. JavaScript remains vanilla JavaScript.
React and similar frameworks introduce non-standard abstractions like JSX and proprietary component models that deviate from web standards. They couple structure, styling and behavior into JavaScript components.
With Nue your codebase becomes primarily CSS-based, with clean separation between content, styling and behavior. You're working directly with CSS rather than through framework abstractions. Hopefully this FAQ answers most of your questions:
React couples the structure, styling into js components only if you make it so. You can just write style.css, import it and refer to it is classname as `className="my_custom_class"`.
And there is no clean separation of concern when it comes to html, css and js. You can force to separate them, but that would be a separation of technologies, not concerns - they are too intertwined to be separated. And the example of island on the tutorials proves that: ``` <form @name="contact-me" @submit.prevent="submit" autocomplete="on"> ```
There is no way to create a standard-first framework without introducing some form of DSL. This doesnt look like html, this doesnt look like js, and it is def not primarily css based anything.
___ The project is nice, using new features like starting style, view transition - instead of js based solutions is cool. There are a lot of experimental features, like popover api. The browser support is low and those things are not production-ready for everyone (maybe for some).
The approach is good, the site is good, the docs are good, but I dont like the distinction from competitors. Like I can use all those features in react/vue/astro/qwik. What makes you unique? Being able to apply web standard solutions? How about something along the lines - we create better primitives so you can create you website faster/easier?
This isn't separating technologies - it's letting each part focus on its core concern. HTML focuses on content structure and meaning. JavaScript handles true interactivity. And CSS becomes the primary engine for both design and sophisticated functionality through modern features like container queries, custom properties, and view transitions.
This natural separation produces systems that are both more powerful and dramatically smaller than JavaScript monoliths. The sophistication comes from systematic relationships, not artificial coupling.
I dont understand how you're making this claim with a straight face. You're either willfully ignorant, or pretending to be too abstract.
If your understanding on web-development is someone tweaking css values, I think you have a hug gap in your understanding.
You've drank the Apple/Linear/Dieter Ram kool-aid a bit too much, and you think throwing "less is more", "strip it down to the bare minimum" is all emblematic of that.
Good design is about making the complex simple. Not making the simple simple.
The problem with Markdown is there is no standard.
Also, kinda silly to "appeal to authority" by invoking Dieter Rams. I understand that the author was inspired by Rams work, but this is akin to saying "My new framework is Iron Maiden" because I happen to really like maiden.
There are some valid criticisms of react but a lot of them want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, much like with many other mature technologies.
I celebrate people who can produce something innovative in the web development world, but at least produce something before making these grand claims while bashing what came before. Those abstractions are there for good reasons!
I just checked out the demo site, and now I'm question their design choices as well.
https://simple-blog.nuejs.org/
Nue claims to be minimalist and an outright rejection of everything that is bloated. And yet, this simple page has an obnoxious blur. I get that it kinda looks nice on first load, but click around - the blur happens on each navigation.
This screams form over function if anything.
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/View_Transi...
2. https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/view-transitions/#built-i...
I haven't seen `filter: blur` used for view transitions before, wouldn't personally call it obnoxious, but to each their own.
I think as long as prefers-reduced-motion is respected, its' fair game.
I looked at the code, and I'm finding it very hard to take them seriously.
https://github.com/nuejs/nue/blob/4ed9b628f9f307f19bd6dd4d09...
This almost feels like someone taking on a challenge to create a toy framework themselves.
--
While we're at it, since the author wanted to poo-poo tailwind. Com'on https://github.com/nuejs/nue/blob/4ed9b628f9f307f19bd6dd4d09...
https://github.com/nuejs/nue/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#dev...
NOTE: the document was just updated to match this concern
It is kinda disingenuous to say "Check out the doc .." which gives the impression that all of the gaps people have identified in this thread was by design all along.
I really like how htmx has handled explaining their architectural trade offs. They're very clear about the kind of problem they're solving, how they're solving it, and when/why their solution is better.
This post just has "get off my lawn" vibes without a ton of substance
Also FAQ:
``` This isn't about rejecting modern development - it's about recognizing that browsers now offer sophisticated capabilities that eliminate the need for most framework abstractions. ```
The problem I have is that I agree with the initial premise, but I disagree with the conclusion. Framework architectures mostly solve different problems than modern web standards.
If you want to go after specifics like 1) just use browser forms and stop re implementing the wheel, 2) you probably don't need a massive state validation library, or 3) stop building CSS features in JS, then I'm 100% on board. But that's not a problem with CSS-in-JS, JSX + render library, components, or many of the other targets you go after.
Things like tailwind (for example) solve fundamentally different problems, and those have more to do with team standardization, avoiding bike shedding, and rapid prototyping. For styling in particular, I don't want to return to the days of crawling through thousands of lines of CSS - edited over years by multiple teams - to find all of the places where different styles impact the specific html component I'm looking at. That's tightly coupled code with loosely defined locations. JSX components just decay less quickly due to encapsulation.
I've also just never seen the separation of CSS and HTML actually provide practical value. It's always been "check out what's possible!" projects like CSS zen garden. Super cool, but that decoupling just doesn't do much in practice.
Like I said, I think there are some interesting ideas here, but I just don't think it's clear why this is a better approach for general web application development (which is the argument you appear to be making).
I'm super curious to see if you prove me wrong, so I'll definitely keep an eye out :). I just don't yet see how the proposed solution solves the identified problems without pulling in a bunch of pain points that were already solved a while ago.
But this perspective misses how fundamentally different modern CSS development has become. When you embrace CSS as your primary architecture, you're not just writing styles - you're building a design system. You can make typography following certain "musical" scales, colors maintaining precise OKLCH relationships, and spacing flowing from consistent ratios.
It's also about the simplicity in semantic HTML. Consider a real example: a typical React component library might need four different versions of text styling: Text, Description, DialogDescription, and AlertDescription. Each requires its own component definition, TypeScript interfaces, and style declarations. But in a CSS-driven system, this complexity vanishes. A single typographic scale handles all text needs through mathematical relationships.
This systematic approach leads to dramatically less code overall. Where JavaScript monoliths often grow to thousands of lines, a CSS-based system keeps in hundreds.
Nue is of course not for everyone. It's specifically designed for developers who see CSS as a creative medium - who get excited about the possibilities of container queries, custom properties, and calc() functions. For these developers, CSS isn't just a styling language - it's a powerful system for expressing design.
And
> Nue is of course not for everyone. It's specifically designed for developers who see CSS as a creative medium - who get excited about the possibilities of container queries, custom properties, and calc() functions. For these developers, CSS isn't just a styling language - it's a powerful system for expressing design.
Are both super interesting and make sense with a number of changes I've seen in the ecosystem. I respect CSS-focused developers (I'm not one, but I like to dabble) and appreciate a ton of innovation that's coming out of the designer-developers who try to push the boundaries of both the roles and the technology.
The disconnect that remains for me is that client/server state management and scope creep are the two main drivers of sprawling code bases in my experience. Having a bunch of 1-off styles in a component definitely made design updates a nightmare, but tailwind and/or just using CSS variables helped improve that. Using service-oriented architecture (including on the frontend to keep complex business logic out of components), GraphQL + fragments + urql/apollo, and/or Remix (or a similar framework) were all really big steps forward in trying to solve the thorny state management problem. They all come with their own tradeoffs, but that's where most of the complexity and sprawl comes from in my experience.
There's definite bloat from people re-inventing the wheel (forms are the most common one I encounter), but the explanation pages feel like Nue is a panacea. I only see how it improves specific areas rather than the whole architecture. I'll say, I really like how HTMX approached their education around this. Similarly, they're a "use the standards!" kind of library, but they have clear examples of what is solved, and what isn't solved. And their "isn't" includes cases where the current approach is better suited. That makes the scope a lot clearer, which I still feel like I'm missing from the Nue project
ETA:
It's also possible that I'm just not the target audience. Most of the projects I've built or lead have been either extremely event heavy (E.g. using Bluetooth sensors attached to limbs + timers to guide people step-by-step through exercises) or extremely data heavy (e.g. analytics and information collection based on dynamic ontologies). The data model and state management were always multiple orders of magnitude more complex than almost anything else.
I would pay really good money to have a library of web components that implemented only the document structure using semantic HTML and the Javascript interactivity, and kept all the styling on a separate CSS file. Something like headless-ui, but without any of the utility classes.
Then we could move on from these template marketplaces (where each dev has to reimplement their own widgets for each different javascript framework), and we would have a simpler marketplace of "Web Component Themes".
Though, I'll say that I agree with OP that a lot of functionality already exists within HTML and browsers.
But I definitely don't like that on top of the blur effect there are scaling animations for each element. I shouldn't be saying this as I'm guilty myself of doing silly things for page transitions in my portfolio, but am working on that.
Edit: after checking the code samples, this looks a lot like svelte (pre-runes). So, single file components with templating with reactivity. I didn't get that at all from TFA..
For reactivity, Nue's client-side library provides the same capabilities as React (components, loops, state updates) in just 2.5kb through HTML-based syntax. But crucially, this interactivity is added to semantic content rather than replacing it.
The critique of React is best explained in this document:
Coupling content, styling and behavior into JavaScript components can easily turn into hard-to-read code that compounds over time. Nue proves you can build more sophisticated interfaces through web standards while keeping codebases lean and maintainable.
I've been doing "web dev" since 1999.
Say what you want about Flash, but most of us cared a lot about usability - small details like keyboard navigation (escape key closing modals, arrow keys for navigating galleries, automatic focus on input fields on login pages, manually crafting tab order to ensure you cycle through relevant parts, etc.). All these things seem to have been lost to time.
On top of that, I'm really frustrated by the fact that the community, in general, constantly tries to teach me how to code in ECMAScript—something I've been doing for 25 years now. Just a tiny example: throughout 15 years of programming in ActionScript, I can count on one hand the number of times I intentionally had to use "===". Today using a simple comparison ("==") is treated as cardinal sin.
Not to mention that we've done full circle with stuff like React reinventing MXML, TS reinventing AS3, asmjs. Anyone remembers redtamarin? NodeJS but with AS? :)
It's easy to be grumpy about all these things.
> Utility frameworks like Tailwind are not design systems - they're just inline styles with better ergonomics. True design systems express visual harmony through mathematical relationships.
Yes, Tailwind is inline styling with much better ergonomics. Why is that not enough?
Yes, you may not end up with a coherent, harmonious design governed by mathematical relationships, but that's not an argument that the resulting product is not perfectly fine, nor is it an argument that your productivity is higher if you spend a bunch of time to learn how to define "visual harmony through mathematical relationships" as expressed in CSS, then go through the process of designing such a system that's suitable for your app before you even start building your components. The fact that you are typically developing your UI in concert with other features of your program is exactly why front-loading this design system effort probably results in wasted work as you rapidly iterate and evolve both. I think this is why Tailwind has become so popular, because it requires almost no front-loaded effort, and so iteration is rapid.
If you're not already persuaded by puritanical aesthetics around this stuff, then justifying this sort of front-loaded effort will probably be difficult. If it does turn out to be difficult, that probably means this approach will have a smaller niche than perhaps you're hoping for. Best of luck!
But there is a time and place for it for sure, not every project is about coming up/producing something "perfect no matter the time/energy". Similarly, not every project is about "getting something OK out there as long as you get there fast".
Nue's approach to styling sounds nice in theory, but it seems like it's only a good fit for a domain you already know well, where the structure of the solution is already well understood and so the upfront design cost is actually minimal. For instance, the example project is a blog, a thing that's been around for like 20 years and whose structure, components and features are already well understood. I just don't think that's very common, but if I'm wrong I would certainly like to someone tackle a project that they don't understand using this approach.
Ideally something better would replace React, sounds like that is their ambition from their home page, not replacing Tailwind.
I think the question they want to ask is: Is React too much?
This is a long term, ambitious project to strip away these artificial layers and return web development to its core strengths. Instead of fighting web standards, we're taking them to their absolute peak.
Happy to hear your feedback.
Personally, I hated MVC in frontend code. It works ok for backend apps (though I prefer service-oriented architectures more), but it tended to creating arbitrary separations that provided little value on the frontend.
Similarly, I think the separation of CSS and HTML was an illusion 90% of the time. The CSS is always coupled with the html, and having it spread across multiple files just made design updates more error prone. That provided all of the problems with separation of concerns with none of the benefits. You want to be able to update things like fonts, colors, spacing, etc site-wide in either 1) components (which works great with coupling html & css inside of component files) or 2) logical areas (which works great with css themes and variables). Neither of those are due to the separation of HTML and CSS.
I think there are a couple of interesting ideas here, but I'd need to see clearer arguments about why these patterns were actually better on the frontend (and when they fail) to be convinced in this direction.
To quote yourself -
> What began as elegant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript has devolved into build systems demanding hundreds of dependencies just to render a page
If HTML is so elegant, why isnt nuejs not using it?
---
On the similar line, if you're so much for web standards, why are you recommending the use of Bun which breaks so much of standards in the name of speed?
which is totally non-standard. Super common, but non-standard. You compiled the markdown to html using a tool (another non-standard item)
You dont get to claim "standards-first" framework and then use non-standard technology and workflow.
> Refs are an escape hatch. Manually manipulating another component’s DOM nodes can make your code fragile.
>>the web platform itself has evolved to eliminate the need for most framework abstractions.
It's refreshing to be able to open the network tab and see the original files coming out [2] and the developer console showing the full structure of it untouched in the same way it's visible from github.
This has opened new doors that was previously closed with any kind of framework, the option to dynamically patch those js file at runtime to customise the interface for unique needs that make sense for someone but wouldn't make sense for 99% of everyone else. Now it's just a matter of submitting a small plugin patch that do it and tada, a happy customer while maintaining only a single codebase
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
[2] https://demo.filestash.app/login?type=s3&access_key_id=Q3AM3...
When I look at the contributors, I see abysmal contribution from other people.
https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/graphs/contribu...
----
What works for one disciplined (and talented) developer such as you might not work at scale.
There's no track record of it but I believe it would be ok in the right team. The core idea was stolen from every other frameworks: "build your app as a tree of components". In the approach I went with, components are modular and expressed like this:
```
export default function (render, props = {}) {
render($domNode)
}
```
```
import FooCompoment from "./component_foo.js";
export default function (render, props = {}) {
const $node = createElement(`
<div>
<div data-bind="component_foo"></div>
Name: ${props.name}
</div>
`);
// render the component with an animation
render(transition($node));
// render a child component
FooComponent(
createRender($node.querySelector(`[data-bind="component_foo"]`)),
{ ...props },
);
}
```
Huh? `ls -l | grep '^d' | wc -l`
> 18
You need 18 dependencies to generate a page?
`touch index.html`
If you want to go back to elegant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it's right there. You don't need bun and whatever this is to use it.
The absolute peak of using web standards is to just open up either the either the W3C or WHATWG specifications. That's it.
> Closer to metal.
Come on man. Be serious for a second. Have you ever even taken a look at the WebKit or Chromium codebase? Whatever it is that you're doing here is so far removed from "the metal" that I doubt you have ever shipped anything that actually needs a compiler if you're writing stuff like this.
So to me a "Vue but built 100% on web standards" at least has a unique selling point.
In this light, I would say Nue's claims about standards first and only are pretty misleading, it does the same exact thing as existing libraries do.
1) This is amazing, thank you for the important contribution to the web!! 2) This is high horse / funny / sad...
I find this interesting. People can make up their mind from the link you posted.
1. Lack of drawings hurt - I had no idea what zaha or rams meant. You had bold text which I thought were links but alas they were just bold text.
2. I actually appreciate math and still wasnt sure how I could use math in the new proposed framework (id kill for a constraint system that was similar to what iOS had).
3. +1 on the crazy level of complexity in today's frameworks (which is why I hate using nextjs etc) but perhaps some code samples (even if proof of concept would have helped) would have been helpful.
For instance, a year back everybody was using pnpm. But now you use pnpm thru corepack.
----
I can understand why people yearn for simpler days, but the reality is frontend developement is super-duper nice, even with all the warts. Anyone who is romanticizing the "good old days of jQuery" is being non-serious or has not lived through the pains of that.
---
You cant write a spotify.com or a amazon.com with jQuery and have 100s of engineers collaborate and maintain.
And neither can you with nuejs.
True but you can write a Spotify or Amazon that ten developers maintain.
We have a huge problems with cargo culting what big tech monopolists use when small teams have fundamentally different needs and would be more productive with smaller tools with less overhead. Though of course the fancy stuff looks better on a resume so can't really blame the devs.
Honestly how many people are writing massive front-ends like these ?
I would argue the number of people using overkill framework for their needs is actually greatly increasing tech debt and slowing things down.
And consider that amazon.com was launched in '95, so yeah, you don't need the latest JS framework to build an empire.
The truth is that 90% of tech is about chasing trends that the people who succeeded have set. It's not because the core ideas have merit or are successful. It's because Facebook did it, so we have to do it too (even though we operate at 1/10000th of the scale). No further reasoning needed, everything else is driven by the hype.
Don't believe me? Just look at the state of LLMs. They're solutions looking for problems and the entire world is eager to waste billions in the process of figuring out that LLMs are not good at factual reasoning.
So back to design systems, googling it I found - https://designsystemsrepo.com/design-systems-recent.
At a high level this looks like a set of templates and themes (but I think you were alluding to something more than just this?)
Rams and his work at Braun may have inspired Apple's products via Jony Ives, but Rams never worked on an Apple product (as far as I'm aware).
It's a bit like claiming "Thomas Edison is the man behind Tesla's motor technology".
> Dieter Rams is the man behind Apple's design philosophy.
(no need for him to work there to impact Ive's stance on design)
You might try "Dieter Rams inspired Apple's design philosophy."
Dieter Rams no doubt had significant influences and admiration for those who shaped his work and design philosophy, should we credit those people as being behind Apple also? How far should we go? Perhaps we need to point out da Vinci is also one of the men behind Apple's design philosophy.
Seems reasonable to suggest "the man behind" is generally understood to mean "the person directly responsible for".
This seems like such a weird claim to make. This used to be "here's a JPEG, you may beg for the PSD". Not saying that there's no gap today but... never been wider..? Am I missing something about the typical Figma setup that makes it worse than a random JPEG export of one state of the UI?
You appeal to simplicity a lot, which is great! Contemporary frontend is way too complex. But a lot of what you're saying comes off as too black and white and rejects some of the learnings of the past decade.
Some examples:
- Inlining CSS is usually faster, but there are caveats to this. [1]
- You say, "the fastest page load is one that requires just a single request". This makes it sound like we should be avoiding the platform (the browser). Browsers can efficiently parallelize multiple requests. We shouldn't have the 200+ requests that many sites make, absolutely. But a rejection of requests entirely is not a goal. If you have a few interactive components that rarely change, having a few chunks that also rarely change means better caching too.
Point being there's no substitute to engineering and experimenting with what actually makes your site perform best for your users.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/performance-now-24-perf...
* related video to above slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5E_U_hu7g0
<a :for="src, i in images" class="{ current: i == index }" @click="index = i"></a>
Seconded.
I gotta be honest: while I actually am sold on the principles in the rationale, I'm not so crazy about what the implementation looks like.
Give me Tailwind standardised utility classes over having to search through the codebase to find what a dev 6 years ago called a CSS class.
I can't really tell what it currently offers over Astro, it does seem to be a static site generator with a couple of nice tricks, I feel like Astro has perfected this.
I don't think it's any more "standards first" than Astro, or am I missing something?
To their credit, Astro authors are humble to tell you that Astro is not a good fit for all usecases, and focuses sharply on blogs, static content with little interactivity.
While MD itself isn't a web standard, it's a strategic choice that reinforces standards-first development by generating pure, semantic HTML. This creates a natural separation between content structure and visual presentation.
Consider the impact on CSS development.
In React codebases, engineers spend 90% of their time writing JavaScript - managing state, coordinating effects, optimizing builds. Style sheets become an afterthought, buried under framework patterns and utility classes.
Nue flips this ratio: codebases become 90% CSS, focusing engineering effort on systematic design through web standards. By keeping content in Markdown and presentation in stylesheets, we maximize the power of native CSS features - from custom properties and container queries to mathematical relationships for typography and spacing.
This shows a lack of understanding of what a modern webapp is meant to be. Again, your framework is a attempt for static blogposts & other non-interactive/minimally intercative sites. Modern javascript developers build complex webapps, whether you like it or not.
You think stripe.com (webapp) engineers are spending 90% of the time tweaking css?
Content-heavy websites have (for me anyway) multiple acceptable solutions currently.
I want to see what your DSL looks like for SPAs.
To be clear, I am your target - developer who noped out of JS frameworks and want something better.
But, like I said, I already have multiple options for separation of concerns with content-heavy or mostly-static sites. What I don't have is a decent SPA framework that neatly does separation of concerns.
Your comparison is between 2 drastically different sites. https://next-blog-starter.vercel.app/ and https://simple-blog.nuejs.org/
That is before we talk about their use of 'bun', which is famously my-way-or-highway engine.
But Nuejs claims to be standards-first. The entire premise of the framework is "All these other frameworks bring their own stuff, and have lost the plot on how beautiful HTML, CSS and JS can be", and then they turn around and use Markdown (not-standard), cli (not standard), bun (not standard).
Depends on how you build things.
https://primevue.org/theming/unstyled/
https://primevue.org/theming/styled/
In most cases, though, there will inevitably be some blurring between the layers, your back end will be coupled to the data model somewhat and the front end will then be coupled to that, both the design, layout and functionality, unless you attempt to build a library or a framework that's detached from a specific project/domain.
For example, even Vue lets you extract your layout into a separate component and then fill it in with slots https://vuejs.org/guide/components/slots.html but nobody ever does that because that'd take more time and they end up just having BasketComponent instead of BasketLayout and BasketComponent, same for not trying to detach the styles from specific components, nobody wants to do that.
Exactly! The more you put styling decisions into your components, the more you hardcode your visual design.
[1]: https://nuejs.org/docs/faq.html
[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...
I'm pretty happy with modern angular for big apps with big teams working on it, and just vanilla JavaScript for smaller simple things.
I've tried lit etc al for components but honestly beyond the pure atomics (buttons etc) there is very little that ever gets reused between projects
I’m no react fan boy, but this is a total straw man. Vite and the like make builds dead ass easy. Also, to try to represent the days before react as some kind of utopia is total horseshit. I have been doing front end for just as long as the author (nearly 20 years) so I lived through that stuff. It was total chaos before. Just gobs of unmaintainable shit. No tests. No reusable code. Nothing. Does react have problems? Yes. Do people use it when they shouldn’t? Also yes. But the whole “it’s too complicated to get it to build” argument is tired.
> 1. Install Bun
Odd requirement to have. I guess they're trying to be consistent in breaking with the old paradigms.
"bun"
Choose one.
What I want is Astro with just web standards like Webcomponents
This is Tailwind nonsense—not JavaScript.
Some critiques:
1. As others have mentioned, lots of abstract in here, not so much data. That's a hard sell to engineers. You're going to get a lot of theory responses, which maybe is what you want at this stage, but it might help to make that clearer if so.
To avoid this, you might consider refocusing the narrative. I have personally found that while appealing to Developer Experience (DX) is the fad, debating DX is an uphill battle. IMO we should appeal to something more concrete: User Experience. The discussion has to start and end with users. DX is part of it, but often over-represented. If I can sit down with someone and show them X technology is failing our users because Y fundamental flaw, the conversation is no longer on frameworkism. It's instead on how you solve problems for your users effectively. See Alex Russell's discussions on this, as divisive as they might be [1].
2. The why is clear. The what and how are not. Clarify what you're doing that is different. For example, Astro is also standards-based. Astro also approaches the problem from progressive enhancement and fundamentals over frameworkism. It seems like your focus is on separation of concerns and design principles? While I disagree on the dogmatic approach re: separation (I personally like components and composition), it would help to highlight your diff.
* I mention Astro, but this is true of other newer approaches, e.g. 11ty, Qwik, Enhance.
3. In another comment you claim that [in Nue] 90% of your codebase becomes CSS. I get that this is coming from the reduction of JS to do what HTML and CSS should, but it feels... disingenuous? At scale, no frontend or fullstack engineer I work with is spending even close to the majority of their time on CSS, regardless of stack. The focus IME is on building features, parsing/integrating data, and everything tangential to the feature (architecture review, testing, docs, etc).
Just some thoughts! I'd be interested in hearing more in the future.
[1] https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/
If you want a truly standards first UI development stack, try Flutter. It critically changed how I view UI development: 1 canvas for any screen. Truly a beautiful thing.
The web already has a powerful "canvas for any screen" - it's called HTML and CSS. Modern features like container queries, CSS grid, and view transitions provide sophisticated responsive capabilities without fighting against web standards.
Flutter's approach is precisely what we need to move away from - trying to solve web development challenges by building on top of the platform rather than understanding its inherent strengths. True standards-first development means embracing HTML's semantic structure, CSS's systematic design capabilities, and JavaScript's proper role in progressive enhancement.
Creating better interfaces doesn't require new abstractions. It requires deeper understanding of web standards and systematic design principles.
The “one simple standard” falls apart when you need multiple platforms.
And honestly the document and document styling model wouldn’t work very well for these platforms.
Everything from “center a div” to “pinterest style masonry grid” is 100x easier in flutter.
Also, flutter is not “another abstraction” on top of web. The widgets don’t map to DOM elements at all. It is a completely orthogonal approach. All of the other web frameworks are indeed abstractions, but flutter is not.
Just curious, have you used flutter before? My impression is that you would like it because there is actually less abstraction. A widget just represents a paintable object on a canvas without any more indirection than you give it.