I love hearing stories about people choosing to forego large frontend frameworks, or even not using JS altogether.
Is there a community or name for this? If not, I'm going to call it #neverscript. I find the web works far better, more often, for me when SPAs and JS aren't used. There's something about minimalistic sites that's very appealing to me. I know it doesn't work for all sites, but a lot of the web could be improved by reducing the frontend bloat.
When you're not using frameworks/libraries, it's typically referred to as vanilla js. Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. http://vanilla-js.com/. This was basically around the time browsers got good enough that jQuery was no longer needed. It essentially emphasized that all the showcase features of popular 'must-have' js libraries were now a standard part of modern browsers.
>Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. http://vanilla-js.com/
Using "vanilla" to describe a standard, unmodified and un-customized version of something is a very common idiom. This satirical website followed the convention, it didn't coin the expression. I don't think it's even jargon, it's just based on the meaning of the adjective "vanilla":
Lacking adornments or special features; basic or ordinary: "a delicious twist to a vanilla plot" (Ian O'Connor).
Of course. But within the JavaScript community, it has taken on specific meaning: no 3rd party libraries at runtime.
For "vanilla js," I can still have compilers, type checking, advanced ECMAScript 2019 features, local storage, webgl, etc. Without that understanding, you could qualify something as "vanilla js" in lots of different ways.
If someone said "vanilla c++," they might mean c++ without the recent language features, or they could mean the latest language spec but no standard library. Maybe it's still okay to link OpenGL but not okay to use a desktop GUI framework? Maybe OS frameworks are okay but nothing more? There's no communal understanding there that I'm aware of.
Would just be called non-JS. However you don't need to avoid javascript completely to cater to non-js users. The term "progressive enhancement" is used for a site that works without javascript but gets enhanced when it loads. Hacker News is like that. The links/buttons would trigger full page loads except the javascript cancels those actions and handles them without. The vote button won't refresh a page, for example.
I personally don't think there's a market for non-js users. Most of the web is pretty broken without. I've never encountered someone in the real world who lives this way, even in the tech world. At most, someone will install a no-script browser plugin. That makes whitelisting and enabling javascript dead easy for the user. The only legitimate non-js use cases, IMHO, are for extreme political cases where you'd also be using TOR.
I have a hobby webcomic, and it made me realize how little code you need for any website. Works great on any device and it is 2mb. That 2mb is the actual comic page. It has every navigation and contact button you could want. And I believe it is about 80 lines of html total.
Boggles my mind how bloated and down right creepy the modern web is today.
A webcomic is a far cry from some main stream site, but it served as a good window into how others abuse their viewers with bloat and surveillance.
I use barba.js to make my site load faster, but at the initial expense of a JavaScript payload to enable the XHR page delivery. It would be cool if browsers offered an experimental flag, allowing the page to be fetched with XHR by default when possible. Then static sites could be even faster, no Javascript download required, because of a little browser magic
Is there a community or name for this? If not, I'm going to call it #neverscript. I find the web works far better, more often, for me when SPAs and JS aren't used. There's something about minimalistic sites that's very appealing to me. I know it doesn't work for all sites, but a lot of the web could be improved by reducing the frontend bloat.