
Better List Views in React Native - HectorRamos
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2017/03/13/better-list-views.html
======
amelius
I'm not a React user, but I'm a little surprised that they are offering well-
performing list-views only now. Is this specific to React Native? And if so,
why is there a distinction with React in the browser?

~~~
hboon
React Native doesn't render UI in a web view as a webpage, instead it uses
native components. Some are direct wrappers around their native counterparts,
but some components while native are "emulated", eg. ListView is built on top
of a native plain view.

Lists (e.g. UITableView on iOS) are one of the most complex UI components on
mobile and might be hard to wrap nicely across iOS and Android, so my guess is
they just didn't have time to do it right.

~~~
nostrademons
Ironically, there's now a backport of React Native back to the web, which
renders the stock React Native components using vanilla <divs> and <spans>.

[https://github.com/necolas/react-native-
web](https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web)

If you're doing cross-platform prototyping, it can actually be easier than
writing the app in React (or vanilla JS) and then porting to React Native,
because the React Native elements are at a slightly higher semantic level of
abstraction than stock DOM elements. The markup it generates is pretty
atrocious, but if you just want to get something up on the screen, you can
work out your design compromises first and then optimize it.

~~~
hboon
Wow. Thanks for sharing. This is quite nice. If done well, maybe it can enable
some kind of playground, cross-platform _editing_. E.g. an editor on iPad.

