[ryandrake]

I guess what I learned from the article is how crazy it is that developers are still putting UIs together with text labels and padding and flexbox-this and align-that. What kind of stone age shit is this? Back in the '90s we were putting UIs together with controls already polished and perfected by the OS vendor, presumably backed by man-years of UX research from those companies. The controls themselves had styling, behavior, event handling, and so on baked in. Fast forward to today's web development, where we've regressed to drawing text inside rectangles and trying to handle click events on those rectangles, and/or wrestling with half-baked "frameworks" that poorly do some subset of what OS-provided controls did 30 years ago?? UI development seems like cooking in a clay pot over a fire that you had to start with flint.

[TimTheTinker]

The root cause here is that unlike native OS controls, most native web controls are primitive as heck.

So companies that don't want to look like Craigslist end up either using an off-the-shelf UI controls library (not a bad decision, in my opinion), or building their own.

Along with the second option, a new set of disciplines is emerging: the design system designer and engineer. Since companies have grown so accustomed to building their own bespoke design language (instead of using the one the OS ships with), it's doubtful that a well-designed set of modern, native web controls (that ship with browsers) would be able to compete with the notion of "having a bespoke design system".

Also, white-label libraries (like Radix UI) are increasingly appearing that handle all the implementation details and leave the appearance to be defined.

[wruza]

Absolutely agree, there’s so much to lose with completed ui controls. It’s akin to the situation when you disassemble a device for the first time, then reassemble it and it’s always some parts left on the table.

Styling and customization are useful and interesting topics in ui. But instead of thinking it through, most libs today just throw a ball of wires at the developer who is clueless and often couldn’t care less even.