this is beautiful, congrats and thank you for sharing

wow, that is really cool! are you using a UI library or are these custom built?

They're all custom built (except for the ECharts component). Thanks!

I really like this, thanks for sharing.

Love the fade-in animations. Really awesome.

The only problem I have (on laptop) is the font combined with the text size (10pt) on the blog is a bit on the smaller side. I recommend bumping up the font of the body to at least 14pt to increase readability for most screens.

Appreciate the feedback. I'll try to improve readability.

Building a normal website with React is laughable, ridiculous overkill, or rather using the completely wrong tool for the job.

Why? React’s component model can be an excellent abstraction for building a “normal website”—or rather, its component parts—for developers who prefer it. React can compile to static HTML, without running any JS client side, and/or can be used to mount or hydrate arbitrary subtrees however one sees fit. (I’d probably favor Preact or Solid for the latter, but React is a perfectly cromulent choice)

React can be used without JS or by hydrating subtrees but those are very uncommon. It’s certainly not React’s “happy path”.

Literally just a single API call: renderToString

https://react.dev/reference/react-dom/server/renderToString

Yes, I’m very aware, but renderToString is designed for later client side hydration.

To make your point you would have wanted to cite renderToStaticMarkup, but tellingly no-one ever does.

Rendering to static HTML is actually pretty common. Admittedly, hydrating subtrees is fairly uncommon (at least where the full tree is also rendered by React server-side), but it’s well within the “happy path” and both patterns have been heavily promoted by React from very early on.

What’s not within the “happy path” is automating any sort of partial hydration process, which is unfortunate, but it seems pretty likely RSC is going to subsume that use case for most anyone trying to solve it with React.

Or just be a sane person and use HTML, CSS, and templates, and sprinkle some HTMX on top for interactivity.

What is the sane person’s templates?

What would be the right tool for an entertaining highly interactive and animated (game-like, but still mostly text based) thing then? Used to be Java applets and Flash. Now is "webapps" and WebGL.

Or is that it should have been handrolled using CSS animations and framework-less JS?

Or is it more that we're acting like it's 1995 and the web is for reading text documents only, and anything other than that is nerd blasphemy? (Not saying you're saying this, but it is something some still say; they hate the web stack being used in other ways).

CSS + HTML5

I’m a ~25 year web development veteran who has grown to absolutely hate CSS for building any remotely complex UI.

did you even look at their site? the last thing i would call it is a "normal website"

This is so sick. Blows Arwes out of the water.

Very cool, but distracting that the very first top left attention grabbing glyph is an unrelated company's logo https://polygon.technology/

Very impressive, and works well on mobile (iOS). Congrats and thanks for sharing.

Very cool, reminds me of 2advanced.com - a very slick flash website from 2001 that now only exists in a museum.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/2advanced-studios-v3...

Thank you for the memory of 2adv. I spent a significant amount of time in high school reverse engineering their SWF file to understand how to do animations like that in flash.

It's amusing that something "futuristic" and "sci-fi like" has connections to the year 2001 and is now in a museum of the past.

Maybe you can make a UI library out of it too!

I love this.

Arwes is about 20% too over the top for me or I would really be tempted to build something in it.

But the style ofyour site is almost exactly what I want. Are you open sourcing your component library/styling by any chance? Also, what does 'FUI' mean in this context?