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📦 Cardboard devlog, what I've done in the last update

Keff on March 17, 2025

Hey there! Hope you're having a great week! I'm building Cardboard, a straightforward, yet powerful reactive web framework. You can look at the re...
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Rishi U •

How would you write a figure with a fig caption, a field set with a label, all wrapped within a form and each having their own styles. Wont it all get well a bit spaghetti i, and neglect separation of concerns? -- Overall its pretty interesting and could really work well for small embedded projects.

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff •

In theory it's possible to do everything you could with vanilla HTML/JS/CSS.

Well, yes. It could be a bit spaghetti, the same way it could in other frameworks I guess. For now it's up to the developer to organize and structure the code. Maybe the issue is calling cardboard a framework, it's probably more of a library than a framework at the moment. It offers the tools to do things, but it does not force you to do thins in some specific way.

My idea was to use it in small projects that need reactivity and basic SPA functionality with a really small footprint. All of this in a very light package that is also very performant by design. Of course it's limited for big apps, but that's not it's primary use-case.

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izaias •

Parabéns

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mineko profile image
Mineko GmbH •

Good job!

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wormss profile image
WORMSS •

Congrats you invented Vue/Solid.js

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Keff •

Not really, main point of cardboard was to remove the need to write html tags. That was the main point. I hate writing html. I don't know what solid.js is, but Vue requires you to write html tags or jsx. Also cardboard is surprisingly fast, and lightweight at around 20kb. Of course other frameworks offer much more stuff, but most things can already be done with cardboard.

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Joshua Amaju •

What's the point of your comment? To discourage them or what exactly?

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WORMSS •

Do you feel inventing something as good as vue and solid JS as an insult?

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff •

Don't worry, I've been in the industry and here for a while. I'm used to it, and don't really care. I find it somewhat funny 🤣

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leob •

Might seem pointless, but I'm convinced you can learn a LOT doing this (even if you end up being the only user of the framework) ...

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wormss profile image
WORMSS •

Oh, I totally agree with that one.. It's very similar to something I made for a static SSR generator... (just not the state tracking/changing) with everything being chainable. (Which I actually like)..
Not a massive fan of the each() part, but I can completely understand WHY it's that way.. But, to be fair, I hate the way React does the same thing with JSX.. I am obviously a very hateful person.. LOL..
As a learning endeavour though, this will be invaluable.

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff •

I'm also quite hateful if I'm honest, that's why I built it.

each is simple, something I value a lot. Cardboard is simple. Might seem weird at first but it's very simple in essence.

It was more than a learning endeavour, it was an experiment to see if it could be done in another way.

I explain all of this and why I did what I did in some other post if you're interested.

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff •

I always thought that a performant vanilla js Framework could be made without all the fuf that most frameworks have. Jsx always seemed excessive to me. And html extremely redundant. So that's why I tried to build this.

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leob •

I don't know if JSX is "excessive", but what I do know is that React isn't performant, at all - unless as an application developer you make it so ... :D

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff •

Yup, most frameworks aren't performant without the developer's help. They add to much overhead and features not used in many scenarios. It can be fixed in some ways using tree shaking and so on, but even then.

Well not excessive per-se, but I've always thought there could be a better way. For me it feels wrong I'm some weird way.

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Joshua Amaju •

If you dislike HTML then you're in the wrong industry my friend. Maybe you should do mobile dev or something

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Keff •

I have, I'd consider myself a mobile developer now. But still enjoy web even though I don't like html.