“Just Use HTML”

AI made frameworks useless for me. Manipulating the DOM is much easier with an AI when you don't use frameworks. Frameworks are a hinderance.

i am yet to see an ai model that can write pixel perfect code , atleast for the designs my designers keep coming up...

Thanks Theo. Although not friendly for my students and educators, this constraint is what I've used to try to bridge the world to vibe coding

To be fair, AI don't make a to-do app in 5 seconds... it’s more like 200 milliseconds now. In 5 seconds AI can build the to-do app, write the docs, and write a 4,000 page novel on the side.

You are wrong. As a professional React developer i can 100% confirm REACT FUCKING SUCKS. When i jump into a new codebase and open the node_modules directory to find hundreds of dependecies even though the package.json has <10, im know its going to be a nightmare to debug. When other teams cant figure out how to fix their bugs and its bounced for 3 straight sprints, thats when my team gets it, and you can bet that almost everytime they are using react + 10 more dependecies that each load 10 of their own and its going to be a fun sprint. fuck react.

Honestly, both arguments are a wash to me.

One could conceivably be understood as being about "don't build simple things with complex tools", but instead comes off as a rant on complexity (meanwhile the complexity still exists outside its scope). The other could conceivably be understood as being about "don't build complex things with a bunch of sticks you found in the woods and a pack of gum", but instead comes off (although to a lesser degree) as a rant on simplicity (meanwhile it's 99.9% of what people need most of the time).

Yet another childish nerd slap-fight: no depth, no self-awareness, no novelty - just chunks of toxic irony floating in a cuss-word soup.

Just fucking use Convex

HTML has NOT been around since the beginning of the Internet. It has been around since the beginning of the web. Learn some history, dude who wrote that diatribe.

This is a perfect website.

I don't understand the recent unnecessary jabs at Android and Linux for things that as an Android user and occasional Linux user never experience.

Convex is actually fucking amazing.

I had a bunch of issues trying to implement popovers a few months ago. The only choice I had was to go back to JS...

Theo I think the point of these is not to say not to use CSS but saying not to use JS.

Video title must be like "Just Use Fucking HTML"

Theo's test if a site is good: has max-width on main text container

i hated react and et cetera passionately right until i decided to rewrite one of my sites in preact/htm/twind buildless last week and actually saw ai making the components more or less right on the first try, with only tweaks and specific design choices i wanted to make left to do

"Just f*cking use css, a**hole"
- Theo

I agree man, I agree.

That intro with the Gucci purse reference was really hilarious though 😂

when I was reading I assumed the message of the html website was that we need to appreciate the base technology, that it is not just for displaying text and can do some stuff too (not react of course, but not useless). And it was written like that because swear words haha funny

Developers need to understand the base technologies, that enables the ability to know when you need extra functionality and not to dive straight into React.

The native date time picker have a time picker on chrome.
I’m currently assigned a ticket to fix mozilla not showing time picker 😢

TBH, I love HTML

People styling with HTML instead of using CSS don't even use HTML how it is intended

I mean, i love Theo, but he miss the point here, i guess. There's a community of web developers that just trying to share how important is to know the basic, the fundamental, the old friend HTML in their details, and how we could use him on the right way, to help us. Isn't about be against CSS or JS, just use the good old basic pilar of web. Hugs, Theo 😊

There is a reason newspaper columns are a certain width: readability. It's blows my fucking mind that so many of these HTML purists miss this basic FACT. And as someone who started teaching myself to build sites back in 19-fucking-93: THANK LAWD FOR CSS.

Also...most AI builders default to React. The idiot around the 20 minute mark is bitching just to bitch (not Theo...who he's reading).

Oh man...
as web dev here working on a product, with all that fucking web standards, I feel and sign under every swear word you've said

The issue is you are comparing what we have now with vanilla html/js/css. When the comparison should be with what could've been if we didn't double down on SPA for the last 10-15 years.

I think it would look very similar to the direction react and nextjs is going with sever components and actions but without javascript or React.

Instead of building around the limitations of browser standards, it would have been better to pressure the browsers to build new standards and get rid of a poop of of backwards compatibility (atleast have some sort of versioning thing where everything that has x uses this new version with all the standards upgrades and stuff)...

Because on the client side we have all these frameworks that does the exact same thing under the hood.. its so wrong to send an entire rendering solution, spin it up and have it process all of this logic to just spit out html, event handlers and some css....

It doesn't make any sense in the modern world.. It hasn't made any sense since like 2016 when we had phones with multiple gigs of ram and hundreds of gigs or tbs of storage.. let alone computers..

Javascript is a very silly choice for most of this. We could've hand standards handle many of these things and have it so that you can use any language you want.

The issue with javascript is that it wasn't built for any of this. so unspeakable things had been done to it to make it usable for all of this but its still javascript so you needed to typescript to make sure all the complexity doesn't create a poopshow.

But the thing is, javascript with types.. while it solves the immediate problem always ends up looking like and abstraction poopshow.. you just replaced one set of complexity for another and in any project above a certain threshold it looks like pretty layouts, pages and components with usually a hook or library where all the complexity is abstracted away and the moment you "go to definition", its a monstrosity that looks like a basdardised java or c#...

And most people, including the person who wrote it barely knows how anything works in the underbelly.. so usually a lot of people just opt for third party services to handle things like auth or in your case t3 chat: core parts of syncing and state management...

I know this problem intimatly because im a pragmatist, I use whatever tool is the best to get job done and unfortunately atm its nextjs.. so I'm using it for a project right now I've found myself repeating this exact pattern for auth. Simple AuthProvider, a few lines of code in the middleware and a few hooks.. then you click on the authprovider, its just initializing AuthManager, so you gotodefinition and BOOM!

Teo forgot to f**kin do it bro!

I am visually impaired. Margins destroy me, require even more mouse movement (to shift the magnifier) and making stuff spread out with paddings drives me insane.
That is because I require denseness. Theo does not.
The further he reads into the third, the more it seems like he feels attacked - and kinda misses the point. x)
Welp, throat deep into react, I guess o.o

Adding reactivity to a plain web site is easier than making a good web site with react. This is because making a good web site requires thinking about what state belongs on the server and what state belongs on the client. You can't make a magical abstraction that stops you from having to understand these fundamentals.

Not sure if it was mentioned in the video or not, I watched this over multiple different viewing sessions, but Inoticed that the first 3 were talking about building a web *site*, and had reasonable arguments (especially when many websites are a nightmare to navigate, e.g. scrolling the whole scroll wheel 10 times, just to get past one section on a part of the product/service the company offers, because you can tie scrolling to animations now and that's a trendy way to design your sites now, even though it makes it look like my browser is bugged when the page stops scrolling and nothing happens for like 3 whole scrolls), and then suddenly from the "just use HTML" site we're now focusing very much on web *apps*, which have vastly different requirements.

Hes even got a framework for his hair.

The original article struck some nerves, I see.

just dont use the internet, why reading on your fancy screen that needs a computer to work and a subscription to a carrier to work, just read a book, it doesn't even waste electricity reading it

The HTML would fit the screen better if you set you screen to a reasonable resolution like 640x480.

Ure a legend theo

writer : look at the moon, it's that simple we just need a rocket with fuel & a team to get there
theo : damn, look at your nails, why is the pinky finger nail trimmed more than the rest ... why are they grey not & white

Just use a typewriter brother who even look at screens these days?

When front end devs shoehorn JavaScript into everything they touch, don’t act surprised when other developers push back and tries to do the same to your ecosystem!

he said in outro: until next time, f***

Just use SQL and Stored Procedures. Works great!

As someone who vibe-coded a slide show with incline css and javascript to get full marks on a business course, the vibes here feels hostile.

HTML and CSS alone can do legit components too by leveraging the browser's ability to parse and style custom HTML (aka CSS-only Web Components):
/* 
Badge component:
<t3-badge count="1"></t3-badge>
*/
t3-badge {
display: none;
background-color: purple;
color: white;
border-radius: 9999px;
padding: 2px;

&[count] {
display: inline-flex;

&::after {
content: attr(count);
}
}
}

I've built entire design systems this way for like 6 or 7 years now. Our design system at work has all the basic components we need and it's just one 7kb stylesheet. So yeah, just use HTML.

That article was definitely written with ChatGPT