Nue status update

The goal of Nue is to be the perfect web framework for UX developers and design-led organizations. We're not there yet, but here's how we keep the dream alive

For the love ❤️ of web standards

Today, there is an unexpected resistance towards vanilla JS and CSS. Nue is an attempt to bring people closer to web standards by showcasing the obvious benefits:

October 2, 2023 Rethinking reactivity

Nue JS is a small micro-library for building user interfaces. While still buggy and in early beta, it showcases the value of separation of concerns and an HTML-first approach. That is: your code becomes easier to read.

October 23, 2023 Tailwind vs Semantic CSS

This article showcases the power of CSS and the web standards model by comparing the Tailwind "Spotlight" template (from the developers of Tailwind) with a version made with vanilla CSS.

February 18, 2024 Tailwind marketing and misinformation engine

How Tailwind positions vanilla CSS as the problem and the "utility first" approach as the hero. Well-known framing for CSS experts, but strongly denied by the Tailwind community.

March 20, 2024 Nue CSS preview

Sneak preview of the upcoming design system approach and the best practices of writing maintainable CSS. The article demonstrates some crazy size differences to Tailwind.

Project milestones

September 18, 2023 "Frontend troublesolver"

The idea of Nue was posted to Hacker News. Here's the backstory and why I decided to dedicate my career to this project.

December 14, 2023 Content-first framework core

Nuekit 0.1 turned the idea into reality. This closer-to-metal framework is an order of magnitude smaller and faster than the alternatives and gives a near-instant feedback loop through universal hot-reloading.

January 12, 2024 Markdown variant for rich content

Nuemark 0.1 is the cornerstone for the content-first development model, where content-heavy websites are primarily maintained by copywriters and technical writers. This project showcases the importance of the separation of concerns pattern.

February 13, 2024 Markdown syntax highlighter

Glow 0.1 A Markdown code block syntax highlighter to meet the aesthetics and extreme minimalistic demands of Nue.

Current status: Beta

You can use Nue to build production-ready websites but with the following limitations:

1. Windows support is sketchy
2. No documentation for Nue CSS yet
3. Nue JS's reactive parts are buggy and the issues are marked low priority.

Up next: ☀️ Summertime

During the summer the focus will be on the following, but with a 33% pace:

Nue design system

Finalize the Nue design system with complete documentation including:

1. Information Architecture
2. Global Design System
3. CSS architecture
4. CSS best practices
5. Design template

Website rewrite

Rewrite the website narrative and the documentation so that the content-first approach becomes crystal clear and why Nue is an obvious choice for UX developers and design-led organizations:

1. What is a content-first framework
2. Why is it important
3. Pillars, values, principles

🦄 The Dream

Eventually Nue gives you the following:

1. World-class design for everyone
2. Ridiculously easy to maintain and scale
3. New levels of performance

We want everyone to have the ability to take the quality levels of Stripe, Linear, or Apple — with the speed levels of a text-only website. Here are the missing pieces, before a solid 1.0 release:

Follow the progress

Join Nue mailing list and get notified when we reach the next milestone

Huge thanks to:

• Nobkd and Fritz Lin for the very many updates and fixes. Thank you!

• Mauricio Wolff (Lead Product Designer @ Atlassian) for the extremely important, high-level design feedback.

• Alan Hemmings for the developer feedback and the mental support. Much needed!

• Thanks to all 25+ contributors for improving Nue codebase.