alt Hacker NewsI'd give people the benefit of the doubt. Personally, having built UI with Win32, WinForms, VisualBasic, Cocoa/Interface Builder, Qt, Tcl/Tk, XSLT, vanilla HTML/JS, jQuery, Backbone, Ember, Knockout, Bootstrap, MooTools, YUI, ExtJS, Svelte, Web Components, and React (including Preact, SolidJS…)… I'll happily choose the React approach. The only other one I would even describe as "good" was Qt.
I also don't get why "XML-like syntax in the JS code" is even a point worth complaining about. If anything, we should be encouraging people to experiment with more DSLs for building UIs. Make your tools suit the task. Who the fuck cares, if it's clear and productive?
Replies
throwaway243123 • today at 3:53 PM
Whoa backbone, ember, knockout, what throwbacks right there.
But it is not really XML like syntax, is it? It is still a string, even if a template string or whatever it is called, no?
That still leaves the door open for XSS. A good (proper?) (e?)DSL would have the things that make the DOM as keywords in the language, and then we could ensure, that things which should merely be a text, are really only rendered as text, not injected DOM nodes. And the next failure is, that this DSL that is jsx needs to rename HTML attributes, because of overlap with JS keywords like "class". It lacks the awareness of context and therefore is not truly like HTML, no matter how hard it tries to be. It also comes with hacks like "<>" or fragment.
Overall it is usable, but not a particularly well made DSL. It might be as good as it gets with JS.
For inspiration check SXML in various lisps, which comes with immunity to XSS and which works just like the rest of the language, can be structurally pattern matched upon and iterated through, like a proper tree structure.