Simon Willison:
Tip for anyone who’s been put off building stuff with JS due to the terrifying array of build tools and packages and framework choices you have to make these days
You don’t have to use any of that stuff!
A few years ago I gave myself permission to ignore it all and just use default browser environments… and it turns out to be a really fun, productive, dare I say delightful environment to work in
Now that we can ignore IE compatibility modern JS and browser APIs are really nice to work with!
— Mastodon
Just to be obnoxious, I threw out something I would miss if I couldn’t use any tools at all (save for the bare necessities like a text editor and a way to get files to web servers and such). But then I kept thinking about it more.
Here are my guesses as to what I would miss the most:
- HTML includes / HTML templating — Unless it’s a one-pager, it’s just 100% obnoxious not to be able to piece bits of HTML together. There are lots of ways, but they are all tools. Ultimately, having something to help get HTML together is a must.
- Live Reloading — Like I told Simon, I simply must have it. Call me a DX charlatan if you must. The browser must, at a minimum, refresh when I save files (or restart servers or whatever it needs to do to make my changes apply). Ideally, it would inject CSS changes (or HTML changes, if at all possible) without refreshing the page in order to maintain state as I do styling work. The spectrum of tools that offer this is super wide, from old school bookmarklets, to dedicated projects, to things like “hot module reloading” buried in the depths of frameworks.
- CSS nesting — I can’t duplicate base CSS selectors or I will die.
I was tempted to say something about concatenating CSS and JS files, but I’m not sure it’s that big of a deal anymore. With JavaScript, just ride that ESM train. CSS is harder. Maybe you can keep it to one file. You can split it with native @import too, which isn’t awesome for perf but probably isn’t a tragedy. The styling story is actually easier if you build with Web Components and look ahead to native CSS modules.