Hi Ryan, thanks for sharing this and your other articles on Solid.
Do you consider animation as an important part of Solid? Having been around to see the Web evolve/regress multiple times on the matter (Flash, GSAP, CSS, Canvas, SVG, WebGL), I feel that modern UI libraries diservice animation. Yet is seems essential to a complete story of Web UI/UX and a hard thing to add as an after though. In this sense, Svelte had some initiative that React lacked. What are your thoughts?
Not where it stands today. It is a very interesting topic but incredibly difficult to generalize. Svelte has admirably taken a really good stab at it and I'd say it is in a good place today although it took a few years of it being out there to get there. I'd love to understand a bit more about what Svelte is doing to see if we can do something similar.
Animation is on my list of topics but as one person I've had to lower the priority of working in that area, as by myself it would probably take years to get right and there are bigger gains I can do right now. I think its a topic that deserves more attention, but it is far from a solved issue. A lot of this stems from the underlying technology not being the easiest to interact with. And progress one UI library makes is generally not transferable. This is an argument for it living outside the UI library but I can't definitely comment on that conclusion without more investigation.
That being said, I said the same thing about SSR and a few months later guess what I'm working on? It is definitely on the list and given the power of compilation and that Svelte has shown what is possible, I wouldn't count Solid out here. Just feasibly the size of the project hasn't had the opportunity. The oldest open issue on the Solid Github is about this topic.
Hi Ryan, thanks for sharing this and your other articles on Solid.
Do you consider animation as an important part of Solid? Having been around to see the Web evolve/regress multiple times on the matter (Flash, GSAP, CSS, Canvas, SVG, WebGL), I feel that modern UI libraries diservice animation. Yet is seems essential to a complete story of Web UI/UX and a hard thing to add as an after though. In this sense, Svelte had some initiative that React lacked. What are your thoughts?
Not where it stands today. It is a very interesting topic but incredibly difficult to generalize. Svelte has admirably taken a really good stab at it and I'd say it is in a good place today although it took a few years of it being out there to get there. I'd love to understand a bit more about what Svelte is doing to see if we can do something similar.
Animation is on my list of topics but as one person I've had to lower the priority of working in that area, as by myself it would probably take years to get right and there are bigger gains I can do right now. I think its a topic that deserves more attention, but it is far from a solved issue. A lot of this stems from the underlying technology not being the easiest to interact with. And progress one UI library makes is generally not transferable. This is an argument for it living outside the UI library but I can't definitely comment on that conclusion without more investigation.
That being said, I said the same thing about SSR and a few months later guess what I'm working on? It is definitely on the list and given the power of compilation and that Svelte has shown what is possible, I wouldn't count Solid out here. Just feasibly the size of the project hasn't had the opportunity. The oldest open issue on the Solid Github is about this topic.
Thanks for taking the time to write a thoughtful answer!