It sounds like you're looking for CSS frameworks and plenty of them exist - Bootstrap for instance doesn't require you to use the JS part of it.

Semantic UI[1] was one I used to use, both the plain CSS one as well as the React version of the library. Version 3.0 is coming (eventually), which has left it a bit outdated for a while, but it's still a solid UI library imho. I have been switching away to Tailwind.

[1]: https://semantic-ui.com/

If you want a component library that's going to give you accordions and stuff there's going to have to be a JS implementation involved.

In the early days of bootstrap, it was jQuery. Now, if you want to use bootstrap w react etc, you're going to have to have a third party implementation for the framework you're using (like react-strap if you use react)

Ant and MUI Target react directly which allows them to provide a first party JavaScript implementation for interactive components.

Tailwind is a great example of a JavaScript agnostic solution right now because it's purely concerned with CSS and leaves it to the developer to implement JavaScript stuff on their own. This way you can use things in the ecosystem like react-table and style them with tailwind CSS classes.

There's https://tailwindui.com/?ref=top, from the Tailwind CSS people. They come with a "HTML" mode, which I think means no JS.

But if you need interactivity, on the web it has to be JS, because that's the only thing that can manipulate the DOM. (Edit: To be clear, there are frameworks that COMPILE to JS, so you the programmer don't have to work in JS yourself.) The alternative would be something like a server-updated Canvas where the UI is done outside of the DOM and not in the client, but even that would need some JS shims just to communicate and redraw the Canvas.

If you want to render the entire page serverside and handle all interactions via clicks and HTTP POSTs and such, you still can, of course. That would just be slower for the visitor.

Probably a "JS-lite" approach like HTMX + Alpine would be worth considering?

I mean, you can use any compile to WASM language and framework like Flutter, Rust, .NET, all of which have their own UI libraries.

But then the UI will be rendered on a canvas instead of using the DOM, which is awful for accessibility.

Not all of them are canvas based, some like Dioxus render HTML and CSS.