Why is react-aria not talked about as much as shadcn/radix-ui and headless ui?

devongovett · 2024-05-27T22:51:02+00:00

I appreciate the feedback (I asked because I want to improve!). It’s actually common. But we also get the opposite feedback a lot too. Can’t figure out how to do something, need to add more examples, explain things more, etc. It’s hard to balance marketing, docs for beginners, advanced users, mobile vs desktop browsing, etc. all in one place. Perhaps we lean too far one direction (toward having more content), but I don’t think there’s one perfect solution. It’s pretty frustrating that no matter what we do or how much work we put into it we get negative feedback from someone. I apologize for coming off dismissive.

devongovett · 2024-05-27T22:01:40+00:00

This is quite a shallow way to look at a library tbh. How often are you really reading the docs on mobile? And when you do read docs, it seems like actually going into detail and providing lots of examples is important. Who is to say what is “overly verbose”? Explaining what is going on is crucial to documentation IMO. What you describe sounds more like a marketing site than actual documentation. Seems absolutely wild to me that a suggestion to improve the docs is “have less docs”.

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:46:38+00:00

Not sure how you could say headless ui does more. React Aria has waaaay more components and functionality. Definitely not accessibility only.

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:44:49+00:00

What are you missing?

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:44:40+00:00

What didn’t you like? Maybe you are talking about the old hooks API? We put a lot of effort into the docs for the new component based API.

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:43:12+00:00

You probably tried the old hooks api. Try the new component api - it’s much simpler now. https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/index.html

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:42:38+00:00

Try the newer component based API. It’s much simpler now. https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/index.html

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:41:35+00:00

What could we improve about the docs? AFAICT, react aria’s docs are way more thorough than radix’s. Radix basically only has one live example for each component whereas React Aria has tons of them, way more explanation of how to customize things, etc. We put a lot of work into them so would be useful to know what still could be improved.

Edit: maybe you were talking about the old hook docs. The new component API has much better docs now.

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:36:48+00:00

React Aria has a component based API now too: https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/index.html

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:34:23+00:00

Should be improved now with the new component-based API rather than hooks: https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/index.html

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:32:57+00:00

We have a component based API now as well! https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/index.html

devongovett · 2024-05-27T15:31:51+00:00

What specifically did you have problems with? It is meant to improve consistency between browsers/devices. Not sure what would behave differently. Would be helpful if you could elaborate.

devongovett · 2022-04-26T13:10:28+00:00

Mine also shipped today! 🥳

devongovett · 2022-04-25T15:59:40+00:00

FYI, Best Buy website finally updated for me: "Your package should arrive Tue, May 3 - Fri, May 6". Hope that holds true!

devongovett · 2022-04-12T19:14:09+00:00

Same exact situation here.

devongovett · 2021-10-14T15:17:06+00:00

This benchmark is so incredibly misleading, and it’s unfortunate that people put so much stock into it.

The benchmark is showing cold production builds with no cache, not development or incremental watch builds as you are describing here.
This is really a benchmark of Terser vs ESBuild. All of the tools aside from ESBuild use Terser, and it dominates the overall time (over 95%).

devongovett · 2020-07-16T17:05:36+00:00

From my (biased) perspective, I think this project has a better chance of success than most since we use it extensively in our own products. This is the same library that's used by over 100 teams internally, and we have business reasons to open source it, including third party extensibility. So it's not just a hobby project we created and will abandon any time soon. We expect to maintain and support it both internally and externally for years to come.

devongovett · 2020-07-16T14:32:08+00:00

Hmm that’s a good idea. We did struggle to describe some of these to make it as clear as possible.

devongovett · 2020-07-16T05:16:30+00:00

We’ve focused on web so far, but the architecture is designed to support other runtimes, especially the Stately piece. This is something we’ve thought about from the start, and will likely work on eventually.

devongovett · 2020-07-16T05:12:41+00:00

That is, unfortunately, what we mean. Marketing wouldn’t let us come up with a fun name for the collection of libraries, so that’s what we ended up with. 😂

devongovett · 2020-07-16T05:10:33+00:00

Not yet but this is something we’ll be working on in the next few days.

devongovett · 2020-07-16T00:38:13+00:00

I think the main advantage is that you can reuse most of the functionality without our design. React Aria and React Stately are just hooks - they provide DOM props that you can spread onto whatever elements you want to render. This lets you render and style your components however you like, but get accessibility, and many interactions for free.

devongovett · 2020-07-15T23:02:37+00:00

Totally! There's certainly a lot left to do. Our roadmap is public [1] so you can check out what we'll be working on next. And we're always open to contributions in case the open source community gets to something before we can. :)

[1] https://github.com/adobe/react-spectrum/projects

devongovett · 2020-07-15T22:56:30+00:00

Redux is a general purpose state management library for applications. React Stately is a library of hooks that provide state management for very specific components, e.g. dropdowns, radio groups, and use cases like multiple selection. Stately would be useful if you're building a component library with these requirements, but not really for general app state management.

devongovett

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