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by serve_yay 4167 days ago
Boy, people never want to accept this. On my team, designers write the HTML. They own markup & styling.

Designers don't want to dig through JS files to change markup, but an even bigger problem is that it's only kinda-sorta markup. For example, if you want to set a class on an element in JSX, it's not class="", it's className="". Because class is a reserved word in JS. How many other little warts like that are there, and how are they supposed to remember stuff like that? It just wouldn't work without a lot of undue pain.

1 comments

"How are they supposed to remember stuff like that?" Designers are never given enough credit. If they can handle all of the insanities of CSS (and various preprocessors), this will seem like cake.

Its just a single `render` method, generally living at the top or the bottom of a file; nothing complex.

Additionally, you stub out your static html markup first -- just like in a template -- and then you add interactivity. In an ideal world this always happens first.

It took our designer all of two minutes to learn the nuances of JSX -- className, that's it!

I would give it a shot, i'm sure they'll manage :)

No, I explicitly told them about this and they said it sounded like a nightmare. I have gotten responses like yours - that basically I don't think highly enough of designers. On the contrary, I don't think they should have to waste their time with such things just because the JSers want to do things a certain way.

A wrinkle I did not mention is that we are in the process of transitioning how we do views. The new stuff is Ractive, but the old stuff is another library whose templates are also straight HTML. So using JSX would not only incur the aforementioned problems but also "wait, this is JSX so I should use this attribute name, and this is HTML so I should use this one." It just sounds shitty to me. And to them.

The situation is not designers can't handle it, the situation is they shouldn't have to deal with that kind of crap.