On one hand I think this is really neat. On the other this is why I have never taken front end development seriously enough to spend any real time learning it [0]. From the get go it always seemed like the rules were arbitrary and involved lots of guessing to get things right. I know this isn't actually true but it felt true enough early on to poison my mind to it.

[0] Not something I'm proud of and I know front end development is serious business so don't @ me.

" I know this isn't actually true "

It's true.

A confluence of vague definitions, poor implementations, bad documentation ... and this is the web we have. It's the tip of the iceberg, and the painful life of anyone doing html5 work, it's 'not fun' for anyone who's been exposed to regular programming because the problems you spend your day solving mostly should not be problems to begin with.

shawn

This is what us older people would like to believe. Meanwhile the young webdevs are having a blast ignoring us and building the apps of the future.

pjmlp

Yeah and then they all jump around React as some amazing achievement, having rediscovereed how 90's native UI do event handling.

jhomedall

React isn't really anything like 90s UI libraries. It is, however, very much like the fairly recent native immediate-mode GUIs that have come out (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/conrod, etc).

The core feature of React is that your UI is a pure function of your application state. In (e.g.) the Win32 UI, you would receive events, and then need to manually transition your current UI state to the new UI state (hide this button, disable this input, etc).