HACKER Q&A
📣 HexDecOctBin

GUI Widget Library in CSS


Hi HN,

I am a Systems Developer who has to do a little web development (a single page dashboard to visualise and modify application state). I only have experience with desktop GUI development (GTK & Dear ImGUI), meaning I am completely new to web development.

I looked around on how to do it and it seems that there are two ways: one is to use huge "frameworks" like React, Tailwind or Bootstrap, etc. with their own build systems and package managers and whatnot; and the second is to use various CSS tricks to emulate widgets on top of more basic HTML elements.

(Surprisingly, the word "GUI Widget" seems to not be used in web world. I think they call it a "Web Component", but I am not sure).

Anyway, I wanted to take the second route and just include a CSS file that would provide me with the behaviour of the widgets that I need (tabs, trees, drop-downs, textboxes, etc.). But I can't find any such library (perhaps due to not knowing the correct search terms). All I can find are a disparate set of blog posts and YouTube videos with these techniques described here and there.

Thus, I wanted to ask: is there a reasonably maintained and bug-free CSS library that implements standard GUI widgets?

It shouldn't be too bloated, since I might have to modify it and I want that to be easy. Also, I don't need any complicated styling options, this is an internal-only tool.


  👤 gurut Accepted Answer ✓
Maybe you could use something like https://v0.dev to convert from one of these libraries into pure HTML/CSS ?