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Oat – Ultra-lightweight, zero dependency, semantic HTML, CSS, JS UI library oat.ink

https://github.com/knadh/oat

Related: https://nadh.in/blog/javascript-ecosystem-software-developme...


synergy2016 minutes ago

https://github.com/fosiao/rclone-webui-oat seems replacing the heavy duty unmaintained react version at https://github.com/rclone/rclone-webui-react

skeledrew7 hours ago

This site got me going. Almost had whiplash when I tapped a link and the page loaded literally instantly. I've almost forgotten that that's possible on the internet. I'm not a web dev, but I'm inspired to get into it now because of this site.

darkvertex5 hours ago

You should try making a site with Astro. Load speed is cray cray.

allthetime4 hours ago

Yeah I’m a recent Astro convert. To be fair, any static site will have this effect. It’s just everyone is using react to make landing pages now.

17186274402 hours ago

I mean you also have HN as a reference.

jamamp5 hours ago

I think it's valiant to try to do all of this with semantic HTML elements to achieve the right effects, and try to go for a "classless CSS" paradigm to get a nice looking and functional web app (as a fan of classless CSS myself). But scrolling through the component catalog, it unfortunately feels like it's all over the place and inconsistent with semantic vs basic elements, data tags vs aria attributes, and sprinkling some css classes over some of it.

I do very much like that by introducing aria attributes, the CSS reacts to it and styles it appropriately. As opposed to a full-blown react component library which does all of that for you. It would be a good exercise for developers to think aria-first and let the library just help with styling.

Lastly, I think the best part is that this component library has a native sidebar. So many of these I see and they have a nice web page which showcases all the components and I want to replicate their layout and nav/sidebars but they only focus on smaller re-usable components and not the layout. So that's a nice touch, I think. And, as someone who keeps an eye on but doesn't do a lot of frontend, the fact that a sidebar is an aside > nav > ul next to a main just makes so much sense and doesn't have a lot of cruft around it.

JSR_FDED8 hours ago

This has the simplicity I thought I was going to get from DaisyUI but didn’t. Pairing this with Datastar seems like a super powerful combination that leans on actual web standards, not “ecosystems”.

swiftcoder12 hours ago

The motivating blog post[1] linked from the front page is probably going to generate a more interesting discussion than the framework itself.

As someone who has to deal with both angular and nextjs for different (but overlapping) stacks at work, I find myself increasingly sympathetic to this viewpoint.

[1]: https://nadh.in/blog/javascript-ecosystem-software-developme...

e12e5 hours ago

Nice link - still relevant IMNHO - even though it's from 2021.

Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28892933

latchkey4 hours ago

It has updates at the bottom. Most recently 14 Sep 2025.

skeledrew7 hours ago

This website pleases me greatly. 0 time from tap to fully loaded pages.

xyzzy_plugh7 hours ago

swiftcoder6 hours ago

Ah ha, figured it must have been discussed here before!

culian hour ago

<aside> is not the correct semantic element for sidebars. The purpose of <aside> is for content that is indirectly related to the "main" content of the page. Sometimes a sidebar fits that definition but not always

mixmastamykan hour ago

Looks good and like the lightweight aspect. As always, what do I have to do get tabs that look like tabs? What do people have against tabs that look like tabs, instead of buttons?

jitbit2 hours ago

I tried doing something like that in my app, and quickly discovered that some modern semantic/functional tags are STILL not supported in some browsers. Or work badly.

For example, in Safari showModal for a dialog tag causes recalculating layout for EVERY element on a page, it’s up to 59x slower than chromium…. :(

But I love the idea

roxolotl8 hours ago

There’s a ton of semantic drop in css libraries similar to this. Love seeing new ones. Quality varies wildly but this site shows 50+ drop in stylesheets for those writing semantic html: https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/

layer83 hours ago

I had to read your comment three times before figuring out that you mean “drop-in”. Sometimes hyphens do matter! :)

neya4 hours ago

This isn't upvoted enough. This is more interesting than the OP's project! Thanks for sharing!

sgc5 hours ago

I love it. You can use the right arrow to cycle through them.

heyyeah2 hours ago

do you have any recommendations from the list?

mrbluecoat2 hours ago

Nice solution. Reminds me of https://semantic-ui.com/ and https://fomantic-ui.com/

potato-peeler12 hours ago

Thank you testing this on older browsers before releasing. This is truly an ultra minimal library - https://ibb.co/DDGmLYdg, https://ibb.co/h1WQG3GK

appplication4 hours ago

Genuine question, do you normally use old browsers as your daily driver for interfacing with the web? I’d be interested in learning why.

recursive2 hours ago

Presumably it's relevant not because they use old browsers but because some of their software's users do. And I doubt most of them have a reason for doing so.

bitbasher2 hours ago

Confusing name, conflicts with Oat++?

https://oatpp.io/

eddd-ddde6 hours ago

The "preview" and "code" buttons in the components break the "alt+arrow" bindings to go back to the previous page. Instead it just alternates between "preview" and "code".

hiyer11 hours ago

Reminds me of what bootstrap [1] was like around a decade ago. It's gotten quite a bit bloated since then though.

1. https://getbootstrap.com/

anton-1077 hours ago

Why do all the UI component libraries always feature an accordion (something i can build myself in 5 minutes and very rarely need), but always omit a date picker / calendar component (something that is needed almost in every corporate web form and really requires a lot of effort to build)?

anton-1077 hours ago

I must appoligize - it is there, hidden under "Form elements" in the left menu. Kudos to the authors!

speedgoose7 hours ago

Isn't it the one from the web browser? An <input type="datetime-local" />

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

webstrand7 hours ago

That one is highly inconsistent, on some platforms its useless. For instance on Chrome/linux entering historic dates via the datepicker takes minutes to slowly scroll through the years. Always build your own datepicker, you know better what UX pattern will best suit your application and your users.

elseleigh3 hours ago

This is a very nice library. At a first reading it seems complete (but did I see summary/detail - I don't remember). Bookmarked for further investigation. Congratulations and thank you.

temporallobe5 hours ago

This is of special interest to me, because man do I hate UI frameworks with tons of external dependencies. Looking at you, Bootstrap.

mxuribe2 hours ago

I used to think bootstrap was bloated too...and then i had heard - now, i don't know if its true - that bootstrap was originally intended *ONLY* as an internal prototype building tool, and any bloat did not matter...because expected audience, usage would be totally fine for a bloated framework...When i heard, i gave boostrap more of a pass...but, then again, i stopped using it, and began using other, lighter weight frameworks...and nowadays, i so rarely touch any web stuff...and when i do its only for me so then use zero frameworks, and merely display whatever default the browser shows with zero CSS, javascript...then again, my private web page needs are so basic anyway.

hkt3 hours ago

This is gorgeous. I hate frontend because of its sheer gratuity, and this is the kind of thing that might get me back into it. The only other contender for interactivity I'd consider is HTMX, and I'm going to boldly assume I'll be able to combine them without too much bother.

Bravo to the author, keep at it. I'll be recommending this to anyone who will listen.

rohitpaulk12 hours ago

Surprised that none of the comments here are comparing this to Bootstrap.

weiliddat12 hours ago

Yeah reminds me of early Bootstrap

JCattheATM8 hours ago

Wouldn't a comparison to Bulma be more apt?

kitd13 hours ago

Great work! PicoCSS feels a bit too minimalist at times. This looks like a better balance of lightweight and functional.

masklinn6 hours ago

It’s a bit odd that the accordion uses details but the dropdowns require a custom element.

nkmnz7 hours ago

I know that guy from listmonk! I always thought the frontend could use some love and planned to spend a couple of days on contributing a couple of ideas, but I never came around. Now I know why things are as they are :)

mkl12 hours ago

Seems pretty unresponsive to me. I'm getting at least half a second of delay before the accordion, drop-down, or switch do anything. Chrome on Windows.

recursive2 hours ago

My first guess is that one of your add-ons is interacting badly.

skeledrew7 hours ago

I have 0 delay for all parts of it. Everything loads and works instantaneously. Firefox on Android.

scandox5 hours ago

Was looking at the spinner component for a few seconds thinking "that's a bit slow"...

Xeoncross8 hours ago

Thank you for sharing, I would like to see a navigation/menu component added though as that's required for most websites.

scirob2 hours ago

ultra-lightweight, these dev's probably go hiking. I like : )

intrasight6 hours ago

What's with variable names starting with "#" as first character?

afishhh5 hours ago

If you are referring to class members in the JavaScript then those are private fields[1]

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

intrasight3 hours ago

I had Googled my question too. Got no hits which is why I asked. Haven't seen it before.

animal_spirits6 hours ago

That's just markdown headers. Some people like to include # as part of the header aesthetic

chrisweekly5 hours ago

No, the Q was about javascript not markdown. Peer comment from afishh (9m after yours) has it right.

jlg2313 hours ago

My initial reaction was that I have to use this just because of the buzzword density in the title. But after reading up, it looks like the author was pretty successful in moving the bloat from code to announcement title. I'll give this a try!

bpev13 hours ago

Amazing! I recently started building something similar for the same reasons, but more out of frustration rather than out of desire. I'll have to give this one a try and see if it fills the need.

neon_me13 hours ago

Nice job! Clicked tru my obscure mobile firefox and all worked well!

TrevorFSmith9 hours ago

If nothing else, it's refreshing to see nicely modern CSS and JS formatted and laid out in a legible manner. https://github.com/knadh/oat/tree/master/src

Maxion12 hours ago

This looks very very cool. Will definitely look in to using this for more static internal tools!

andrei_says_13 hours ago

Thank you for this, can’t wait to use. Minimalism at its best.

[deleted]12 hours agocollapsed

vpribish2 hours ago

how do you contrast this with https://picocss.com/ ?

I like your presentation of the components, but i'm having trouble finding the essential distinctions

leejoramoan hour ago

I often use Pico CSS, and a comparison would be nice.

gaigalas4 hours ago

The form component:

https://oat.ink/components/#form

Looks a lot like a raw HTML+CSS framework I made in 2009:

https://alganet.github.io/ghiaweb/ (it has some small glitches, browser widgets changed a lot since 2009).

Particularly the use of the label, fieldset and legend elements as native accessible solutions instead of instrumenting divs. Even the styling and the example resembles it a bit!

https://oat.ink/components/#grid

This is where it falls from grace IMHO. Grid classes are fundamentally non-semantic. I know they're popular and useful, but there must be a better (semantic) way of doing this. I haven't found it yet, but there must be.

mgaunard12 hours ago

The code example doesn't render for me.

freeopinion6 hours ago

Ditto, if you mean the codeblock in the Typography section.

edit: clarification, focus

freeopinion6 hours ago

The Preview of the Sidebar doesn't display the Logout button in the footer of the sidebar.

edit: That is, the footer is not within a visible area of the sidebar.

superkuh6 hours ago

No, this is "Oat - Ultra-lightweight, semantic, zero-dependency Javascript UI component library". If it doesn't work without javascript it is not an HTML UI component library.

recursive2 hours ago

If it doesn't work without HTML, it's not a JS library.

dankobgd8 hours ago

People need to stop with these stupid 12 column grids and learn how grid and flex work. Other elements are ok but this is just stupid

pphysch4 hours ago

It's a 12 column grid system built with CSS Grid. 12 column grids are a common design pattern. What would you propose instead?

yoz-y12 hours ago

Claims no classes but uses data- attributes and also classes (just look at the button example…)

Looks okay, but I don’t see why to use this over something like Marx if all you need is to not have bare browser default styling.

kitd9 hours ago

The claim is "no classes for native elements". Ie you don't need classes just to create a button etc.

mcknz12 hours ago

should call it oatmilk for max exposure

scandinavian12 hours ago

5 day old repo, 2000 stars on GitHub, 400 total weekly downloads on npm. Frontpage of hacker news with a bunch of weird comments. Moderation has been lacking recently.

codegeek8 hours ago

You are jumping to conclusions. The author is the CTO of the largest online brokerage in India but more importantly, they have created many open source software of good quality. His website and blog are of great quality. Whether you think this library deserves more attention or not is your personal preference but it is far from spam. I havr no affiliation with them but like their work.

bityard8 hours ago

It's possible for both things to be true: this project is written by a developer well-known within India, AND this thread has a lot of bot (bought?) comments of praise in it.

dangan hour ago

I'm not sure which comments you're finding weird, but I spot checked a bunch and didn't see anything that looked particularly bogus, other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026348 and some trollish ephemera.

The upvotes on the submission look legit to me, as does the submission itself.

ssiddharth12 hours ago

The author is the CTO of Zerodha, India’s largest online brokerage. Not that it matters, just an observation.

smarx00712 hours ago

I thought they also OSSed a pretty solid https://github.com/frappe/helpdesk helpdesk but that was from Frappe, not Zerodha.

isodev11 hours ago

A CTO that codes? Interesting indeed.

simonw5 hours ago

That's pretty common in small companies. It's less common in large companies but can happen - you may use the "CTO" title for the founding engineer who still leads code and architecture, then hire someone under a different title (frequently "VP of Engineering") to handle the management / team growing side of the role.

appplication4 hours ago

That sounds like a reasonable split to me, so much so I’m not sure I’d understand why you’d want the same person handling both code/architecture and management.

subscribed8 hours ago

CTO in my company* remains SME on a several components, commits to several production repositories (and expects the most stringent PR checks), and maintains couple of small tool used by us and the customers.

Its not that rare I think.

*small fintech with couple of billions in the accounts, not a startup, not a Fortune 500 company

sschueller12 hours ago

Sad that HN is now also getting boted by LLMs. People are just shameless. HN is one of the few places left where you can post / self promote something you have made only for people to take advantage of it.

ZeWaka12 hours ago

The strangest part is the weird commenting accounts have pretty old account ages.

quadrifoliate11 hours ago

I don't know if you're demonstrating reductio ad absurdum, but maybe that's because they are genuine? As people in the thread have pointed out, the author as well as their company is pretty well-known in software circles. They have had multiple projects discussed on HN in the past[1]. 2000 stars is not a lot given that [2].

I fail to understand why a ton of breathless blog posts about the process of AI-assisted coding are more interesting to HNers than some of the actual code (potentially, not claiming anything about it) written.

Maybe you or the GP could actually say what you think are "weird comments" and why you think this is being "boted"?

---------------

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] Why are people obsessed with star counts? I at least only star things to bookmark them, not vouch for them in any way. It does not seem unreasonable to me that 5 times as many people bookmarked the repo in the early days than are using it on npm. Also, npm is not necessary, the author shows at least 2 other ways to use it (direct download, link to GitHub pages) which will not show up in npm stats.

sfdlkj3jk342a11 hours ago

> I love it. We need to see more of this.

> Use of semantic elements is an interesting take. I'll give it a try.

> Thank you for this, can’t wait to use. Minimalism at its best.

> Good one. Presentation is good too. Thanks

These are the kind of comments you see from Indians paid to boost Youtube content.

n_e8 hours ago

An explanation that would fit both the old accounts and the artificial comments would be that they were encouraged by the author to comment (which is against the HN rules).

skeledrew7 hours ago

I'm on the other side of the planet, generally not a fan of web dev, and heartily agree with the sentiments in that comment.

hkt2 hours ago

Same here, DevOps by trade, allergic to ridiculous frontend nonsense, my comment praised the framework.

jonathanstrange8 hours ago

They're probably just Indians using the framework saying "thanks." India has the largest population on Earth, they're close to 1.5 billion now. I think some people underestimate what that means.

quadrifoliate7 hours ago

This seems like some pretty lazy analysis to be honest.

Following the first comment you quoted...

> I love it. We need to see more of this.

...shows that the author talks about using a “Chase card abroad” in a previous comment [1], which means they cannot be Indian as Chase doesn't issue cards or have substantial operations in India.

I don't want to run around following specific comment authors back through their threads, but as an Indian by birth it is pretty hurtful to see this kind of drive-by casual characterization of an population in a space like this. It also seems to be pretty contrary to the HN guidelines (“Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.”)

--------------

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46535775

debarshri11 hours ago

It is probably not bots. The reach of authors is pretty good. He actually loyal fan followers in india. You can see the same when he shows up on a podcast or talk.

I think theres alot indian developers who are hacker news as well as on github and other forums.

JasonADrury11 hours ago

Why do all the comments look exactly like paid comment spam?

debarshri11 hours ago

On second look. It could be spam. This is disappointing.

decremental11 hours ago

[dead]

e2le7 hours ago

Perhaps stolen accounts? I doubt every user is practising good security hygiene with a unique password per each account. Password leaks from other sites might well allow a motivated individual to hijack some here.

leke7 hours ago

I could speculate that someone in the past had the business mindset to create thousands of accounts over multiple sites and offers the ability to loan them out for a period of time.

gas9S9zw3P9c10 hours ago

If you search you can easily find sites to buy aged HN accounts, lots of them. Just like reddit accounts.

[deleted]8 hours agocollapsed

koakuma-chan13 hours ago

This is kind of misleading. It says it's an HTML UI library, then it says HTML + CSS, and then it says it also includes JavaScript. Why is this better than, say, DaisyUI?

dangan hour ago

(Submitted title was "Oat – Ultra-lightweight, semantic, zero-dependency HTML UI component library" - we've replaced it now)

httpsterio12 hours ago

Iirc there's a few web components in there which would require js.

villgax10 hours ago

I just want something that's as easy to use as DaisyUI or even Bulma with one good set of components & themeing(beyond just palletes, like rounding, blur, transparency etc) & I'm good. For all the self-hosting model afficianados surely needing a build platform to create a blackhole of npm modules & internet connectivity for even a single build surely negates the entire point of a coding LLM if we still force it to deal with frontend

koakuma-chan9 hours ago

You mean you want DaisyUI but with extended theming, like ability to make inputs, etc, rounded? This is also something I was considering.

maximalthinker7 hours ago

[dead]

dingi12 hours ago

[flagged]

rado13 hours ago

[flagged]

altcunn3 hours ago

[flagged]

boston_clone2 hours ago

Generated comments and bots aren't allowed here, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888857

wvlia52 hours ago

How did you detect it?

boston_clone2 hours ago

em dashes, sycophancy, exaggerated details vis a vis metaphors, AI evangelism in bio, and my own dash of undiagnosed ASD.

pattern-seek for yourself: check their other comments; some seem legitimate which might suggest a human in the loop.

akrauss12 hours ago

No Datepicker?

bdcravens6 hours ago

As pointed out in another comment, it's under the form elements, not listed as a top-level component as many UI libraries do

https://oat.ink/components/#form

Which actually makes sense: Oat's driving philosophy seems to be to use and enhance native controls as much as possible, and the date picker is already a native type on the input element.

ziml773 hours ago

But there's no enhancement here. That's just the native date picker control with a bit of styling on the textbox portion of it.

akrauss5 hours ago

Thanks, I missed that when looking through the component list on the top level.

bartvk10 hours ago

I'm not a web dev, but doesn't HTML come with a date picker?

LudwigNagasena7 hours ago

HTML also comes with a button and an accordion.

deafpolygon13 hours ago

I love it. We need to see more of this.

bartvk10 hours ago

I'm not a web dev, what do you love about it?

visarga12 hours ago

This does not even need a LLM skill, just load the whole code up in context, so efficient.

recursive2 hours ago

Doesn't even need a context either.

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