Honestly, the separation of concerns movement where content writers do HTML, designers do CSS and programmers do Javascript, all with with minimal overlap, set web development back a good 10 years. React was a wake up call that the three are intertwined so closely that you cannot think about them in isolation.
One of the early criticisms of React was: “You can’t do HTML in Javascript. You shouldn’t be styling in JS! That violates the separation of concerns.” React skyrocketed productivity and allowed scaling without spaghetti. That’s why it won.
CSSZenGarden was fun, but how many companies seriously did redesigns by just swapping a style sheet? Only repeat the dogma if it makes sense....
HTML in JavaScript still feels wrong to me and I still hate JSX. The Vue and Svelte approach to simply having the HTML in the same file was much more digestible.
I think React won because it had a more gradual learning curve than Angular and a didn’t drastically change between versions.
And the idea that HTML/CSS/JS are non-isolated is over-thinking it. It only applies to the world of Webapps. HTML can be published and served all day without CSS or JavaScript. And you can do a lot with HTML and CSS alone.
Why hate JSX? There are lots of benefits to it, like debuggability and variable scoping rules are exactly those of javascript. Templating languages, on the otherhand, are not debuggable and have awkward scoping rules. And, they always feel broken in one way or another.
JSX is not magical which is what I appreciate the most about it.
Don’t forget proper and full typescript support. Going back to vue (2) after doing tsx was like going back to jquery; loads more context switching and mistakes.
The ability to type `children` alone makes a world of difference.
One of the early criticisms of React was: “You can’t do HTML in Javascript. You shouldn’t be styling in JS! That violates the separation of concerns.” React skyrocketed productivity and allowed scaling without spaghetti. That’s why it won.
CSSZenGarden was fun, but how many companies seriously did redesigns by just swapping a style sheet? Only repeat the dogma if it makes sense....