Who are you, dear commiters?

[azmeuk]

Hi there,
I used Semantic/Fomantic UI for years now, and this post is an occasion to warmly thank the team making it alive. ❤️

I am curious about the health of the project, and consequently about who is the team behind Fomantic. Unfortunately there is no "about page" on the website, so I came here to ask :)
Are you hacking on Fomantic on your free time or as part of your job? Is it still exciting or do you get bored with the time passing? Do you anticipate changes in the future? How did you get to involve in the project?

Have you a roadmap for the project, even a blurry one? Several years ago @y0hami indicated that merging back to Semantic was a goal, is it still the case? Are you in contact with @jlukic? He seems to work on a reboot of Semantic-UI lately, maybe joining forces would interest him?

If money is an issue, did you consider requesting grants such as Sovereign Tech Fund or NLNet NGI? STF appears to be more focused on low-level tech but explicitly targets popular understaffed projects, and I think Fomantic is one (Semantic-UI repo has 50k stars, I think this is a good argument for popularity). NLNet is more about prototyping, so it could be pertinent for big tasks such as cutting jQuery or dark theme support, but I believe they could support day-to-day maintenance and janitoring too.
I don't know about STF, but the subscription form to NLNet is pretty short. I thought it might worth a try.

cc @lubber-de @ko2in @mvorisek

[jlukic]

I'm working full time on a ground up rewrite of Semantic now, which includes first principle thinking about web components (modern shadow dom aware jquery replacement called Query, new signals based reactivity framework, new spec based system for declaring ui, new templating language that compiles to Lit HTML, new css token theming framework, some other goodies). I'm happy with the progress so far, but I'm about halfway done. I plan on about 6-12 more months of work before a public release or announcing it anywhere. I'm self funding my work on it and dont plan on monetizing, just spending savings like the first time when I originally made Semantic which is fine for me.

If I'm being honest, Fomantic has been quite a pain for me as they hijacked nearly every social thread about Semantic UI to pronounce the project as dead and link to their fork and generally insulted my work publicly and my management of the project. Seeing every twitter post that said "Hey I found this UI framework Semantic its pretty cool" only to see fomantic ui tweet back a variation of "It's dead! Use my fork instead!" removed the minor dopamine hits that made me want to work on the project at all, and was the primary reason why I stopped releasing updates for Semantic UI. I appreciate their intentions to continue the project, but the how they handled it perhaps wasn't the greatest. It's water under the bridge now, but I think its worth mentioning for those who used it.

[mvorisek]

Thank you for this post and for all the work making Semantic-UI superb. I hope there is a misunderstanding. I cannot comment on the whole story, but I follow Fomantic-UI since the beginning and I can agree we all want to get traction of our projects.

However I have to defend Fomantic-UI authors here. I know how much it takes to maintain popular repo and especially how much it takes not only to write code, but to manage CI, issues, user ideas/pulls and any kind of human intentions. Sometime we celebrate like heros, sometime we cannot keep up and someone forks our repo and promotes that fork using the already popular repo more or less triggering our emotions. Speaking from my experience.

The part that does not resonate with me is your post souds like you stopped the development mainly because of Fomantic-UI. Based on my perception of the past issue discussions this is not fully true. Fomantic-UI fork was created to address multiple unfixed bugs and heavily wanted features that were not addressed for a long time in the Semantic-UI. So with this chronological order, I have to say I thank you for all the efford the authors of Fomantic-UI fork did and even say big thank you for the comments they leaved in the Semantic-UI repo.

In addition, again, from my perception, Fomantic-UI authors have very clearly stated in the beginning they are not doing all of this because of they want to carry the burden of maintaining one extra repo, but to help all exisitng users to support Semantic-UI and more or less help to get the Fomantic-UI changes ported back to Semantic-UI once the project is active again.

So with this said, I understand how it feels when someone writes "this project is dead, use fork xyz". Big projects are about strong teams. I do not know you nor know any Fomantic-UI author face-to-face, but I would be really happy if the pressure between Semantic-UI and Fomantic-UI can be settled and the feelings and goals communicated openly to enter a new era of warm-hearted collaboration ❤

[y0hami]

Hi all,

As stated above I originally created Fomantic purely to continue the development of SUI due to it become stale and so many of us including myself needed updates and bug fixes. I've been away from the project for some time now and @lubber-de has been the one keeping fixes and updates rolling out so let's all show him some appreciation for his awesome work! These days I simply stay on the team in more of a supportive role and provide help when needed.

Now regarding the health of the project, as far as I'm aware @lubber-de is continuing support and releasing updates. I think the original intentions of merging back into SUI are long gone. The reason I think this is purely due to the time passed and the separated "brands". It could become very confusing for people to move back to SUI as a lot of users won't even know SUI exists as they've just come across FUI. We actually have double the amount of downloads on NPM which makes it clear that FUI is now the most popular framework. There is definitely other complications which would make merging not worth while now too but I think it's clear as much as that was the intentions and I would have loved it for that to happen this is just no longer the case.

Moving on and with the development of the new version of SUI by @jlukic which I think is a good thing, however my brief overview of the new project I feel is not something I want or this project should get involved in mainly for 2 reasons. 1. I personally don't think the way it is developed for the end user is the best. That is not me saying it is bad or Jack is doing a bad job, this is purely my opinion so please don't see this as a bad thing as I do believe others will love it. 2. I think the goal of FUI and SUI-Next are different right now. When we discussed v3 many years ago (wow it's been a long time) we were looking at making the framework more modern and up to standards. This being said and looking at the current frameworks available we were definitely a head of our time with what we wanted to create which personally I think is a good thing. This means there is lots of amazing frameworks out there to choose from which are developed by great people. It also shows as maintainers we were on the right track with our thinking so I am confident that @lubber-de can keep FUI moving forward which has also been showing over the past couple years with his work. This leads me to, what is FUI now? I think FUI is in a state of maintenance mainly. It isn't going to be getting any crazy new version (at least any time soon) it simply is being maintained so people who still use it can continue to use it without worry. I think this is due to the way the web is developed these days doesn't align with the current FUI design so it falls into more of a legacy framework rather than one to consider using today. This being said doesn't mean @lubber-de won't add new features. I say this in the sense of a project as a whole.

I think now would be a good time for @lubber-de to respond with what his goals and what he wants to do moving forward with the project :)

---

In relation to your comments @jlukic regarding how the project made you feel etc. I'm genuinely sorry that is how you felt because we had no intensions of taking the project or the credit away from you. I honestly just wish you'd had reached out to chat about this but I also completely understand why you didn't. Like you said it's water under the bridge now and I think we both from each side can appreciate each other for their work.

Genuinely good luck with the new SUI version as it looks like you're putting in a lot of work and I'm sure you're proud and I'm also sure lots of people will love it. Again don't take what I said above as anything negative it is purely my opinion and not a negative comment regarding the project. Hope you understand that :)

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Also thank you @mvorisek for adding some info/context I appreciate it!

[lubber-de]

As @mvorisek and @y0hami (thanks for your posts and everything the past years, guys!) already summarized everything regarding FUI History, i will just shortly reply to @azmeuk here.

I am working on FUI in my freetime ever since. I mostly need it myself for private projects and some internal webpages for work.
While using SUI in 2017, i also needed some fixes and desired more features, so i was glad i found the discussions which led into FUI.
I became a FUI maintainer after providing the first calendar and toast improments PRs and loved @y0hami , @prudho and @ColinFrick for reaching out to me via discord back in late 2018 to offer collaboration. It was a time where i was very glad, people liked my work and wanted to work together with me and i learned a lot since then 😄 .

It's still fun improving FUI and over the years, so many things are doable using raw CSS now, which is the way i want to improve FUI.

So, yes, i will continue maintaining FUI using its original SUI spirit:

Simply using css classes as a grammar system and only make use of javascript-widgets where raw CSS isn't possible.

--> That's also the reason we never looked into forking SUI-React.

So, 2.10.0 will get some new widgets which are commonly used on modern UIs. I don't want to spoil yet, but if you look into all the feature request issues (yes, also in the SUI repo), you may get an an idea 😉
That said, I found a few abandoned ui widget projects, which i think we could merge, just like we did with the calender or slider component some years back.

Getting rid of jquery but staying compatible using some compat layer is still on the todo list.

I was also looking into refactoring the themeing system to (also!) use/support CSS variables and to be able to switch themes on the fly and to have a more flexible color-system and making use of custom themes a bit easier.
If this gets eventually finished, we most probably remove all the "inverted" variants as discussed in #2868
All of this needs time as i would like to provide a few/new theme variants to show the improvement and possibly needs a 2.11.0 / 3.0 and staying backward compatible as good as possible. Following the dark theme PR (#ll), you see some people just stop working on their contributions.

Support for IE was already removed, the next version will most probably also remove support for older browsers as described in #2854 to be able to achieve the above goals.

As i forked/patched/fixed a lot of unmaintained (gulp-)dependencies #3047 into the FUI namespace (FUI@develop now got zero dependency issues #3181 !), we may reduce some overhead/complexity of the current build system, but these are just some thoughts while fixing all those build / gulp issues in the past.
Btw, the final decision to fork and fix all those abandoned deps was the same why FUI once was created...

Some ideas also from the community are already possible by combining existing FUI elements.
Instead of providing such combined elements as a dedicated widget into the FUI core, i think we should rather provide some kind of plugin system or addon widgets repo.
Also the majority of emojis and icons are candidates to become addon packages. Probability for a FA 6 Upgrade gets higher as we already made the icon list easily adjustable via a LESS map #2470 .

And yes, the docs page could be improved as well. Things like editable examples using a codepen or using semantic html tags instead of divs, even if SUI was designed to be tag-agnostic.

Roadmap? We almost never promise dates, but 2.10.0 should see the light in 2025 😉
... not containing everything i mentioned above though...

We still provide the latest FUI updates every night via the nightly npm/jsdelivr version, and i know some people already use that.

[ivangomes]

@lubber-de Thank you for all the good work!