"Building a Toolkit for Design" by Matthew Griffith

25K views · 8 years ago · talk · intermediate · evergreen

Matthew Griffith, creator of elm-ui, explains at elm-conf why he built a layout and styling toolkit for Elm that replaces most CSS. He argues for a smaller, more consistent set of layout primitives designed around how designers think about pages.

HN people send it to anyone wanting a fresh perspective on CSS, layout and styling, and as the case for elm-ui as an alternative to CSS.

“For those who want a fresh perspective on CSS, layout and styling, check out this talk”

6 comments from Hacker News

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@qolop2021 · in “25 Years of CSS”
For those who want a fresh perspective on CSS, layout and styling, check out this talk by Matthew Griffith - the creator of elm-ui ▶ this video
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@giantDinosaur2021 · in “I don't want to do front-end anymore”
Not necessarily solved, and I assume you know about it, but for anyone reading this, elm-ui is definitely worth checking out for at least an exploration of an alternative to CSS. For a talk about this: ▶ this video
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@cttet2019 · in “IBM releases Elm-powered app”
As nhanb mentioned I meant link There is a great talk about it: ▶ this video
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@slimsag2022 · in “Show HN: Codestat.dev – Stats from 2M open-source repositories”
Ha! Long time no see :) I'm no Elm expert, but I would say from what I've seen that mixing-and-matching (JS+Elm, CSS+Elm) as you see fit is totally fine, adopting Elm can be super incremental. When it comes to changing CSS dynamically, it's quite nice to have that in Elm code too rather than say a CSS class you toggle. The thing I'm using here is elm-ui, it takes a more opinionated approach and basically eliminates a lot of the CSS oddities: instead of numerous flex, margin etc. CSS properties you just get simple alignLeft, centerX, etc. attributes in a row/column layout. Quite nice. There's a talk[0] about it. [0] ▶ this video
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@cies2021 · in “Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?”
Elm + elm-ui[1] (dont worry about CSS so much) + generated Elm client lib from GraphQL schema + Hasura (GraphQL over Postgres) + Postgres => strong type safety from db schema to frontend with SPA-first workflow; possibly add ReactAdmin[2] to the mix if that sort of thing is needed. Rust + Actix + Yew (Rust browser framework compiling to WASM) => also verrrry nice vor SPA-first! Slightly more traditional: Kotlin and jOOQ on the server side. I also tend to let go of the HTML syntax lately, by using templating eDSLs such as in Elm, or in Rust's Maud[3], or in Kotlin's kotlinx.html or HtmlFlow. [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link [3]: link [4]: link [5]: link
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@giantDinosaur2020 · in “Why is CSS the way it is?”
Given my thoughts (and recent experience) was shaped by something like Elm-UI - see: ▶ this video If you have the time to learn CSS, you have the time to learn anything else. ;)