I could really use a UI "toolkit" for the web, something with a small set of "widgets" that I could compose into simple user interfaces. The complication is that I want something simple and lightweight, and ideally, without JavaScript.
The sort of things that I'm looking for are buttons, input fields, bar graphs and some simple nest-able containers to organize all this in. You would think that HTML and CSS provide all this, and I suppose they do, but the "magic" of divs and the complexity of CSS not to mention the differences between browsers, screens, etc. make it something of a specialty to be able to make things that last with this parts.
I have thought about approaching it in a brute-force way, using a single canvas and just drawing the UI like you would on any other bit-mapped screen. This is enticing, but I have no idea how to make something like that accessible, and it certainly doesn't work without JavaScript.
Over the years working on preposter.us I've curated a tiny bit of HTML and CSS that could be the beginnings of something like this (I even have a few things that I made for features of preposter.us that never went public) but even that I don't fully understand.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a little something that made the page behave like a tiling window manager? I remember programming in something, maybe TCL/TK where you just stuck widgets into boxes and boxes into boxes and the tool arranged it more-or-less automatically. The results were not always pretty, but they worked and they were surprisingly consistent between applications; two things few modern web applications achieve.
I'm not even sure how to search for such a thing. It would be cool if it exists and I could just use it, but I don't know how I'd find it without just flipping through dozens of the wrong thing.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026