Which maybe you want that, but most people are building something else.

Avoiding tangling them means basically developing a UI library with its own opinions and idioms. Tangling them is not just easy, it’s the default. Once you’ve succumbed to this even partially, composition becomes incredibly difficult because the underlying model leaks implementation details. But that’s where inertia will guide you because there isn’t even a notion of state that doesn’t reference the DOM etc. That’s almost always the opposite of how you’d want to design a system with more than a very small amount of complexity.

The equivalent in “vanilla JS” can easily become unwieldy even with a lot of discipline, because the underlying APIs are designed with the view as the source of truth.

The UI component model’s data flow might vary between libraries, but they’re all generally opinionated and fairly consistent internally. They establish idioms for data flow and composition. Verbosity is hardly the problem these UI libraries/frameworks solve. (There is a third question, do you need an installable app too? In which case a SPA with a toolkit that supports PWAs or web view wrappers is a good option if you want to only have a single codebase) However, sometimes the first question overrules the second. If I was answering the second question as server side right now I would probably pick htmx+alpinejs. That is no longer the case for the second question, the state is increasing moving to the client side, and that's why I joined the team. The project I'm on when they first asked those questions, the answer was, Perl CGI and server side state in a database. where is the state? Is it predominantly in a database on the server or client side in the browser? what do my team and myself know well, what will be the most efficient? There are two main things to consider when picking a toolkit or architecture for a web app/site: You are complete right, to many people chose a tool based on fashion. We have kept the old Perl CGI server architecture, just refactored it to return JSON. Have moved the whole thing to a VueJS frontend. Massively grown past the point where that is suitable, with plans to add interactive features that would be crazy to do with the old architecture. I have just spent the last year doing the literal opposite.ġ5 year old software product built on Perl CGI with a server rendered html+jQuery front end.

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