Whenever I confront a design system problem, I ask myself this one question that guides the way: “What would HTML do?”
HTML is the ultimate composable language. With just a few elements shuffled together you can create wildly different interfaces. And that’s really where all the power from HTML comes up: everything has one job, does it really well (ideally), which makes the possible options almost infinite.
Design systems should hope for the same.
I love, love, love the deep thinking that Lea has put into this, really digging into the guts of what design does.
Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently and is a hallmark of poor design. Eigensolutions are the opposite: solutions that generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases. Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability.
Lea ties this into web standards too. It’s really helped clarify for me why I want more declarative options for common use cases (like a share button)—it’s about raising the ceiling without raising the floor.
The thinking behind the minimal JavaScript framework, Strawberry:
Even without specialized syntax, you can do a lot of what the usual frontend framework does—with similar conciseness—just by using
ProxyandWebComponents.
HTML sits on a boundary between the machine, the creator, and the reader.
One of the things we’d hoped to enable via Web Components was a return to ctrl-r web development. At some level of complexity and scale we all need tools to help cope with code size, application structure, and more. But the tender, loving maintainance of babel and webpack and NPM configurations that represents a huge part of “front end development” today seems…punitive. None of this should be necessary when developing one (or a few) components and composing things shouldn’t be this hard. The sophistication of the tools needs to get back to being proportional with the complexity of the problem at hand.
I completely agree with Alex here. But that’s also why I was surprised and disheartened when I linked to Monica’s excellent introduction to web components that a package manager seemed to be a minimum requirement.