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Why Storybook? |
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The web’s universality is pushing more complexity into the frontend. It began with responsive web design, which turned every user interface from one to 10, 100, 1000 different user interfaces. Over time, additional requirements piled on like devices, browsers, accessibility, performance, and async states.
Component-driven tools like React, Vue 3, and Angular help break down complex UIs into simple components but they’re not silver bullets. As frontends grow, the number of components swells. Mature projects can contain hundreds of components that yield thousands of discrete variations.
To complicate matters further, those UIs are painful to debug because they’re entangled in business logic, interactive states, and app context.
The breadth of modern frontends overwhelm existing workflows. Developers must consider countless UI variations, yet aren’t equipped to develop or organize them all. You end up in a situation where UIs are tougher to build, less satisfying to work on, and brittle.
Every piece of UI is now a component. The superpower of components is that you don't need to spin up the whole app just to see how they render. You can render a specific variation in isolation by passing in props, mocking data, or faking events.
Storybook is packaged as a small, development-only, workshop that lives alongside your app. It provides an isolated iframe to render components without interference from app business logic and context. That helps you focus development on each variation of a component, even the hard-to-reach edge cases.