A standards-first web framework

I help maintain Lit[1], which I consider a very standards-first non-framework.

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

Lit is amazing. But I don't like template strings for HTML. The IDE doesn't understand it automatically, and lit jsx had a bunch of issues last time I tried to use it.

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.

[1]: https://github.com/webjsx/magic-loop

[2]: https://www.webjsx.org

I think the true legacy of React will be normalizing tight coupling, especially when combined with Tailwind. An entire generation of developers learned to bundle everything into JavaScript - content, styling, behavior, and state all living in the same files. Nue aims to reverse this mindset by showing how proper separation enables more sophisticated systems, particularly once our design systems arrive and you can see the difference. Now it's just words.

> React will be normalizing tight coupling, especially when combined with Tailwind.

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.