I think these government ones are more about keeping a consistent style and look across departmental websites, than advertising a product for general use.

In fact, I think the government would not take very kindly to hobbyists making official-looking websites serving a non-government agenda.

Front-end isn't that difficult for websites that primarily display information and at most require a contact us form or some basic CRUD.

So, naturally, given what may be an unconscious existential dread that one day the world may realise that front-end is more or less solved, front-end developers like to make sure that there's always something new to do, rather than admit that a problem is more or less solved.

And thus fashion is born.

Clothing was also a problem solved. We figured out that we needed shoes, trousers, shirts, jumpers when it's cold, coats when it's raining, etc.

But once you have those, well, the tailor has no income. So the idea emerges that we need to have nice shoes, shirts and trousers for special occasions.

And that perhaps some clothing items are better than other clothing items.

And what if you don't want to dress in white and grey tomorrow, perhaps you'd like to be eye-catching?

And so, fashion was born.

The basic template is the same. You have some fabric that covers your legs, genitals, torso, arms etc. and the lower half is, more often than not, a different garment to the top half, to allow for easy swapping of components for different looks etc. But the base structure is the same.

And if you are so inclined, you can have a totally bespoke and crazy item of clothing made for you by a designer.

Sound familiar?

I've semi-frequently had to build custom tree views and tree selectors with multiple modes of operation and various amenities. And sometimes the way those complicated widgets are built requires that we customize more basic components like split-buttons or dropdowns to match so that users aren't thrown off.

Sometimes all of this can be accomplished by taking a library like Bootstrap and applying a theme. But sometimes the theme gets so intense that we realize we're basically just building Material UI on top of Bootstrap's code, and it makes more sense to use that library instead. And as mentioned before, sometimes there are just things that we can't get from Bootstrap or Material, but that we're going to use fairly often (last I checked, Bootstrap didn't have a 5-star rating widget).

The "It's Fashion!" narrative seems very appealing to people on HN, to the point that I'd advise people to double check that they're not falling for confirmation bias before proffering it as an explanation.

Just to clarify, Bootstrap is designed to be themeable, they don't hardcode styles. Examples: https://www.bootstrapcdn.com/bootswatch/

I think web design can convey similar things, sometimes at the cost of utility. For example, a website may want to convey that it’s for professionals and businesses. Or that it’s fun & silly like a toy. Or that it’s for academics and learning. The style of the site helps to identify if you’re in the right place for your “group”. users can look past bad UI. In fact, they will often complain if you decide to “improve” the UI without their consent.

Can you really not think of one thing that you couldn't do in the frontend 10 years ago that you can do today? Or that is significantly easier to do today than it used to be? Nothing new or novel or of value has emerged lately? I understand that your comment was intended to be inflammatory, but come on. Use your brain.

It’s obvious you are a tech person who did not study fashion design and don’t know what you’re taking about. No one would use the term template. There are silhouettes and there are patterns (that’s a technical term). There’s a reason Uniqlo is respected by fashion design students, but H&M / Zara is the bane of their existence, and that difference is pattern. Pattern, even more than fabric, is that difference between a $200 designer t-shirt and $5 from H&M. The layman will notice color, maybe a luxury logo, but the trained eye looks for pattern. Pretty much every MFA thesis is pushing the boundaries on pattern and silhouette among other things such as process, and that’s why the garments may appear outlandish. Every decade, a professional fashion designer comes with a distinct silhouette. Unlike students, it is more basic and rudimentary, yet no one has thought of it before. There was Alexander McQueen, now there is Demna Gsvalia, in between there is Raf Simons. Based on the way you’re describing things, I don’t expect you know who any of these people are. Yes, it’s fashion and doesn’t introduce any functional improvements, but the way you’re describing things makes fashion seem superfluous. It’s art yes, and maybe art is superfluous for you, but it’s weird to use analogies on a discipline you don’t really understand. It’s fine if you don’t care or don’t understand or don’t think fashion is important, but don’t think you know what fashion is simply because you wear clothing. I understand this as a naive and hand wavy analogy, but if I were to take it seriously then it’s quite offensive to suggest fashion is unnecessary. It’s the equivalent of a non technical MBA waxing up corporate talking points about Machine Learning or cryptography, or one of those San Francisco Uber drivers who mention their glory days as a tech executive during the Dotcom bubble, but goes in a circle of buzzwords when you ask them about the technical details.

> you can have a totally bespoke and crazy item of clothing made for you by a designer

This reflects your preconceived notions that there is Costco, and then fashion = couturiers. This is not 19th century Paris nor some developing country where rich people go to a local tailor who has a range of fabric in house and makes clothing from scratch.

First, if people are seeking a specific “designer”, they’re going to seek out motifs or a particular style of the designer. At the same time, the designer has their specific approach, and so this is not infinite possibilities of bespokeness.

There’s also nuanced distinction between tailors, designers, couturier, atelier craftspeople, pattern makers, creative director. What you think of “designer” is most likely a creative director at the helm of a fashion label. These people’s skills are management, understanding industry trends, strategically positioning their brand given budget/limited resources, deciding what the art direction for advertising should be, managing / taking risks. Nowadays many of them don’t even design or are capable of working with the garments. It’s the difference between a movie producer and a director of photography. For sufficiently small firms, they might be the same person, but at any sufficiently large project, especially with how much money is involved in fashion, it’s not. These are different roles in the industry, and there are overlap and people can change roles, but most of the time people can’t. It’s like thinking all engineers, or all engineers in tech ( SRE vs SWE), or even all software engineers are interchangeable. In Japan, I see management try to teach designers to become software engineers because to them all people work with computers are equivalent.

> Clothing was also a problem solved

It’s not a solved problem. New fabrics are being developed. Mount Everest, high altitude climbing, winter sports is becoming easier over the decade in part to innovation in clothing and wearables.

Then there is athleisure wear, athletic wear. Fashion is symbiotic with functional improvements. Cowboywear were fashion but also function.

> nice shoes

Just because the shoes are nice looking doesn’t mean there aren’t improvements in comfortability, and function. Allbirds which is liked among the HackerNews crowd just IPO’d in the last year.

Moving past how misunderstood the analogy is, you’re not seeing the value in brand identity and uniqueness. Coca Cola is mostly branding.

And how long will this last? Until the next administration who hates the association with the predecessor's style?

To an extent the spoils system has been a bit in the past for a while.

I really love the landing page. Has any landing page ever been useful at all to the end user? It's always a top priority, but on pretty much every site I've ever used it's never seen or used. Often I'll scroll all the way down just so I can get to the bottom page links that I'm actually looking for.

I wonder why this is so difficult. Everybody has seen Google's landing page. Function over form. It's really weird that "design meetings" have completely eliminated usability on the damned home page.

This one is high-quality enough that if it was done by many interns, those are some really good interns.

My favorite thing about google's home page is having their elaborate doodles load just as I'm about to tap on the search box, leading me to an unintended search. Function over form at its finest.

I've resorted to bookmarking an empty search results page.

I don't remember the last time I actually went to the Google home page. What leads you there these days?

Source: I was the VA.gov engineering lead for awhile

This is just a case where folks are happy that our government isn't doing shit in Dreamweaver anymore and has moved on to something that resembles progress. However, government should be focusing on streamlining government operations, not developing accessibility standards and reinventing the same wheel. Leave that to professionals and use what's already available.

As for streamlining - this is streamlining, making it so that multiple entities within government that all need to build websites can use a common shared resource instead of duplicating the work (even "going shopping" for external solution takes valuable time).

You really ought to check out how fast this design system has iterated to date:

https://github.com/uswds/uswds/releases

> However, government should be focusing on streamlining government operations, not developing accessibility standards and reinventing the same wheel. Leave that to professionals and use what's already available.

First, I'm not sure why you think accessibility doesn't fall under streamlining government operations.

Second, the folks at USDS are top professionals from industry and are limited to a four year "tour of duty", so they aren't lifelong government employees.

larger entities with multiple, decoupled teams often move toward developing their own living design systems as bootstrap no longer fits the many idiosyncracies of the organization.

i'm really looking forward to design systems that no longer rely on set breakpoints/grids and move to fully flexible, responsive layouts and components (come on, container queries!).

Bootstrap and other opinionated frameworks are super handy when you don't have designs/designers though.

After individuals noticed that it's possible to make tons of money through donations/sponsors on Github and providing support for their OSS many just rebrand libraries by sugar coating abstractions on top of it (what FastAPI did to Starlette) and trying to own all parts of the development (by not giving access to anyone on the project for example) so that they own they're seen as the only person able to provide true support for it.

See https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/4263 and https://github.com/tiangolo

While I agree with you in general, I think the US gov has an excuse while others may not: they have much stricter laws and requirements they HAVE to meet.

So we make our own. Now they’d suck for anyone else to use, but they’re perfect for us.

I would say the moment you are dealing with business logic you are no longer dealing with something that can seriously be called a "component", that's just application development. And if you are spending developer time to build custom HTML select boxes or dropdowns in the year 2022 you're really doing something wrong.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion.

https://www.section508.gov/

* Full control over browser support (Government Agencies are likely to have to support older browser than Bootstrap for example would support).

* Full control over accessibility (as far as I know, Bootstrap is not entirely accessible).

* Ability to limit customisation to more closely fit any government style guide etc.

* Not needing to update the version they are using whenever Twitter drop support for older versions, as they completely control the development life cycle and how long they support each version for.

Possibly some other ones I have missed as well.

Would they have saved money in the long term by using Bootstrap? Quite possibly (although I think it is hard to say definitively, and I really doubt creating this library cost significant amounts of money).

Would using Bootstrap have resulted in sites that didn't look as nice? I highly suspect so.