But what happens when you need inline editing, filters, searches, live updating data from a server, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
A single standard element will never handle everyone's use cases. The parent comment is seeing new wheels being designed for a high speed train and wondering why they are reinventing the wheel when wheels have existed forever.
Nope. The parent is seeing reinvention of basic UI capabilities such as a basic table and virtualized scrolling and wondering why they are not available natively
But from that superficial understanding I assume it has to do with control:
In a game you control the rendering/layout logic more specifically. Not every element has to follow all the rules, they need to follow certain rules, scoped to their use case.
With CSS we only have high level control _and_ a predefined data structure that may or may not make sense for specific cases (DOM tree), so each rendering node has to respect _all_ the features, plus _all_ these dependencies are propagated across the whole tree, whether it makes sense or not for a given use case.
If we had more generic, less abstract control, we would not have the same problems. Maybe there is merit in exposing more control to web developers.
Have thousands of physics entities in a game interacting with each other and see how it goes. That's why we see things like "millions of falling ducks" as an impressive demo or benchmark for 3D programs/engines.
I have managed to create the fastest Javascript Data Grid out there by not working with indivual <td> or <div> nodes for cells, but by using a neat CSS style: this only needs one dom node per COLUMN, not per cell.
The downside is that the product does not support multi-line rows.
Here's a performant demo of One Million Cells: https://www.datagridxl.com/demos/one-million-cells.
1. A read-only table for presentation purposes, with pagination and sorting options. (DataTables)
2. A read-only data grid that supports high-frequency updates/redraws, for things like Stock or Bitcoin trading. (Ag-grid?)
3. A data grid to edit JSON/Javascript data, with user-friendly spreadsheet-like controls. (DataGridXL)
4. A spreadsheet-product, with features like formulas, merged cells, HTML (images) in cells, pivot tables, etc. (Handsontable?)
Source: https://www.datagridxl.com/compare.
We don't need big libraries, we need to mix smaller libraries together that each do one thing well.
Like starting with a tutorial of how to build a data grid from scratch with suggestions of utilities to add along the way. Most people would avoid this because they see a library that does most of what they want and get a FOMO...but if they could only see the hours they will lose trying to customize it, they would have preferred to start from scratch. This has been such a constant experience for me with almost every framework/library in tech.
My experience is that a lot of these features are more easily implemented than the time taken to handle the edge cases of using existing libraries, getting them to work with your UI framework (React/Angular), and getting them to work with your data service layer.
