alt Hacker NewsI'm a fan of anything that allows me to build with javascript that doesn't require a build step.
Modern HTML/CSS with Web Components and JSDoc is underrated. Not for everyone but should be more in the running for a modern frontend stack than it is.
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I have not written a line of JavaScript that got shipped as-is in probably a decade. It always goes through Vite or Webpack. So the benefit of JS without a build step is of no benefit to me.
Webcomponents are a pain in the ass to make, though. That is, sufficiently complex ones. I wish there was an easier way.
Agreed on native HTML+CSS+JSDoc. An advantage in my use-cases is that built-in browser dev tools become fluid to use. View a network request, click to the initiator directly in your source code, add breakpoints and step without getting thrown into library internals, edit code and data in memory to verify assumptions & fixes, etc.
Especially helpful as applications become larger and a debugger becomes necessary to efficiently track down and fix problems.
> Modern HTML/CSS with Web Components and JSDoc is underrated.
I've been a front end developer for 25 years. This is also my opinion.
This. Or use ts-blank-space if you prefer TypeScript over JSDoc. That's what we do in https://mastrojs.github.io
I was already doing that in 2010, with the JSDoc tooling in Eclipse and Netbeans back then.
However I don't get to dictate fashion in developer stacks.
Came here to write this exact sentiment. Not everything needs a massive build pipeline.
Why? The half a second for the HMR is taking up too much your day?
On the one hand I can see the appeal of not having a build step. On the other, given how many different parts of the web dev pipeline require one, it seems very tricky to get all of your dependencies to be build-step-free. And with things like HMR the cost of a build step is much ameliorated.