That HTML Blog Weekly Digest #4: The Legacy of React & Tailwind
Friday, August 11, 2023
Hi everybody! Next week we'll get back to your normally scheduled overview of links about the how of web development, but this week it's more about the why — and in particular, why seemingly popular/trendy tools keep hanging around when better/faster/simpler (and often much closer to the "metal" of how browsers and open standards actually work) options are to be found for the vast majority of projects.
But don't take my word for it!
Vanilla JSX if that’s your scene ➦
Chris Coyier presents some examples of using JSX without React and talks about other flavors of JSX like Astro and Preact:
React Is Not Modern Web Development ➦
Is a popular piece of technology used by millions of web developers actually modern new hotness or simply appears to be to the untrained eye? And if it IS in fact a legacy project born out of needing to solve particular problems in a past era, then perhaps it’s less hardened & practical and more simply, well, old & busted.
John Collinsworth buries the lede a bit in his excellent overview of this topic, so I’ll take the liberty of drawing it out and placing it front and center:
The Legacy of Tailwind CSS ➦
Jeff Sandberg does a good job outlining the hazards of Tailwind and why we should be concerned about what he feels is “a larger problem in development”:
As always we've been having lively debates about all of these topics in The Spicy Web discord, so please join if you haven't already done so. And once again, thanks for subscribing to That HTML Blog!
Cheers,
Jared