> Just make something that works with with HTML and CSS alone, and enhance it with JS. You don't need to be clever about it, especially if the level of interactivity on your website amounts to basically a form.
A big problem with this is that html is extraordinarily limited as a widget framework. You only have a handful of widgets available, and many of them offer very little (if any) customizability from CSS.
For example, say you wanted a checkbox, but you wanted to use a custom shape (Edit: shape - color is more easily controlled today) instead of the browser default. Well, tough luck. From HTML you'll have to put the checkbox inside a label, add an empty span next to it, and from CSS make the checkbox invisible and then get creative with drawing some boxes that look like a checkbox [0] (or, more realistically, load some custom graphics). So, if you're doing all of this effort anyway, why go through the effort of using the HTML input checkbox at all?
I always find it fascinating just how barebones and bad HTML+CSS is as a GUI framework. I really don't understand why people insist it's in any way superior to using a JS toolkit for anything requiring more than the simplest interaction (say, more than a newspaper article).
[0] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_custom_checkbox.as...
A big problem with this is that html is extraordinarily limited as a widget framework. You only have a handful of widgets available, and many of them offer very little (if any) customizability from CSS.
For example, say you wanted a checkbox, but you wanted to use a custom shape (Edit: shape - color is more easily controlled today) instead of the browser default. Well, tough luck. From HTML you'll have to put the checkbox inside a label, add an empty span next to it, and from CSS make the checkbox invisible and then get creative with drawing some boxes that look like a checkbox [0] (or, more realistically, load some custom graphics). So, if you're doing all of this effort anyway, why go through the effort of using the HTML input checkbox at all?
I always find it fascinating just how barebones and bad HTML+CSS is as a GUI framework. I really don't understand why people insist it's in any way superior to using a JS toolkit for anything requiring more than the simplest interaction (say, more than a newspaper article).
[0] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_custom_checkbox.as...