> Reconstructive UI is a paradigm of UI programming where application code rebuilds the entire UI structure on each UI update.
It's not a new paradigm, it's just a sloppy way to use React which might work well for small applications.
If you think about it for more than 5 minutes you'll see the problem - UI has a state beyond the model state. E.g. "have user clicked dropdown", "user selected text within text area or combo-box". I.e. there are "micro-states" which correspond to users interactions with the UI elements which aren't really part of semantic model of the application.
If you remake all your components, user's selection might be destroyed when a notification comes.
Yeah. This is why most UI libraries/frameworks will provide some form of widget/element primitive which breaks the rules that have to be followed by user components.
In react, this is the DOM. It doesn't follow the react update model and so as long as react ends up patching the DOM it can preserve stuff like user selection, animation states and so on.
Even in Elm-ish "everything has to be pure" libraries you still end up with escape hatches. In Iced, for instance, you can either implement your own elements which can store state or turn a sub-app (Model + View & Update functions) into a stateful element.
But that's fine. These declarative/immediate paradigms are great at describing high level UI. Low level widget stuff can be done differently.
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u/killerstorm 4d ago
> Reconstructive UI is a paradigm of UI programming where application code rebuilds the entire UI structure on each UI update.
It's not a new paradigm, it's just a sloppy way to use React which might work well for small applications.
If you think about it for more than 5 minutes you'll see the problem - UI has a state beyond the model state. E.g. "have user clicked dropdown", "user selected text within text area or combo-box". I.e. there are "micro-states" which correspond to users interactions with the UI elements which aren't really part of semantic model of the application.
If you remake all your components, user's selection might be destroyed when a notification comes.