Why don't more developers "use the platform"?

nonethewiser

An aside: This name an logo are incredible. https://bevacqua.github.io/dragula/

slopinthebag

since the author brought up the native <dialog>, developers chose custom implementations of dialogs because they want better accessibility, better focus management, better mobile and touch screen reader support, and more flexibility. adobe's implementation is far more robust and flexible compared to the native dialog, and it's hard to justify "use the platform" when it results in a strictly worse end result.

ibash

I feel like it’s a historical accident. In the past the platform couldn’t do it all, and if you wanted a dialog you had to use a library. Developers were trained to reach for libraries when they needed something like a dialog. Then react came along and all developed learning web development after react had little to no knowledge of the platform. They were taught that touching the DOM was a bad thing to do. That’s about it. Even now when I advocate for vanilla css I get the side eye and “tailwind and shadcn should be the default”. I get it, it’s what most people are familiar with, even if it’s worse than the platform.

JSR_FDED

It’s funny, the article proceeds to answer the question in great detail: familiarity, level of abstraction, documentation, etc. I agree with his point that learning to do it yourself can be fun and lead to a flywheel of improvement where the next time you’re faster and the next time faster still. In the past that was the recipe for success as a developer, nowadays with AI many feel that’s no longer the case.

onion2k

The last couple of websites I've made have been largely the output of Claude with some instructions to keep to WCAG AAA accessibility standards and to optimize for loading and rendering times, and it's done a pretty decent job. If you're insistent about page weight it will avoid adding JS and React and use to browser-native elements, CSS, and vanilla JS where it can. I think the problem is that you have to ask, and to know the language to get the result you're after. If you just ask for a pretty website you're getting 800KB of React libraries to render something, and all in AI Beige with Inter as your font choice.

jchw

For one thing, I just genuinely think WebComponents are a badly designed API that is weird and hard to use (how many people are using WebComponents without at least Lit, if not something much bigger?), and React is a relatively well-designed library that isn't really that bloated. There's not really much of a point in trying to argue since this is inherently subjective and people with different values are going to irreconcilably disagree. But, if you don't respect that some people hold this position, we're not going to make any progress towards a consensus. On the note of <dialog>, I recently tried to use <dialog> in a (React) application, and it did work pretty well, but I also found that in Firefox it is only practically possible to do a fade-in animation, not a fade-out one. That isn't really a critical issue for me, it is just an animation after all, but I find it unfortunate. I also find <dialog> to be a weirdly shaped API too: I don't really hate it, but I don't love it either. It feels awkward. I find this implicit view that developers that, for example, prefer React over WebComponents are making a suboptimal choice to be rather condescending and not really in the spirit of trying to see things from the other side. Wouldn't you want to focus on the strongest arguments and not the weakest ones? Maybe you've literally never heard anyone complain about WebComponents or Shadow DOM, but if so, I find that surprising. Certainly here on HN, I've seen a fair bit of WebComponents hate. I do , FWIW, realize that I've particularly focused on WebComponents, which this article doesn't actually name directly. But, I assume we're not talking about ditching React to implement our own component framework on top of the traditional DOM APIs, because that's what React already does...

charcircuit

Because the platform is too hard. The average person does not want to spend time figuring out how to get stuff to work. All the browser documentation is 1000 times nerdier than the average person wants. They want all this low level stuff abstracted away from them. Even if you want to do it the nerdy way and bust out a text editor and start writing some HTML tags it all looks ugly out of the box. Browsers pushed everything for naming websites onto 3rd party devs, so they shouldn't be surprised when they want to use 3rd party dev's stuff over the bad and confusing 1st party ones. The browser developers are in an ivory tower building a product that doesn't really care about web developers and their needs.

qurren

Because the platform sucks. I want a rounded button with a certain radius and a certain font, that feels squishy and satisfying when you press it, especially on mobile.

usernomdeguerre

As far as I know there are still some things "the platform" actually won't deliver; for instance I'm fairly certain there's no searchable combobox that's fully accessible. One ~must leave the platform to give users the experience the expect. That means "the platform" itself is actually teaching people to work "off platform" and arguably will always have gaps as functionality and expectations evolve. Admittedly, the habit really ought to be 'I need to make a combobox -> does the platform have what I need? -> Research, evaluate, test -> Otherwise, make it' but I don't begrudge people for skipping the middle steps.

satvikpendem

It's because frankly the platform has been historically shit. Web components comes to mind as someone else here has mentioned, as it's just not a good API and needs wrapping to make it usable, same as IndexedDB which the author readily admits as a creator of such tooling. It seems like the ones who determine the platform aren't actually developers day in and day out and thus don't dogfood their own products while the rest of us do, leading us to reinvent the wheel. Here is a great comment and discussion (scroll down) by Ian Hickson who wrote the HTML5 spec on how the platform has essentially failed on its promises causing everyone to write everything in JS or even other paradigms like Flutter and other WASM or canvas based frameworks that eschew the web entirely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696

techaqua

can the title be changed to "Why don't more developers use browser native features?"

zatkin

Is it just me or does it feel like Anthropic and OpenAI (and probably others) are pumping harness engineering and the like to try and convince engineering organizations, or even entire companies, to "use the platform", and not meddle with software anymore?