es-module-shims VS stampino-element

For full compatibility and extra features, we usually use the library es-module-shims.

You can polyfill for unsupported browsers, it works surprisingly well: https://github.com/guybedford/es-module-shims

https://github.com/guybedford/es-module-shims has a polyfill. (But it is fairly large: 53KB raw, 15KB gzipped, 32KB minified, 11KB minified+gzipped. It’s providing a lot of likely-unnecessary functionality. I’d prefer a stripped-down polyfill that can also be lazily-loaded, controlled by a snippet of at most a few hundred bytes that you can drop into the document, only loading the polyfill in the uncommon case that it’s needed—like how five years ago as part of modernising some of the code of Fastmail’s webmail, I had it fetch and execute core-js before loading the rest iff !Object.values (choosing that as a convenient baseline), so that the cost to new browsers of supporting old browsers was a single trivial branch, and maybe fifty bytes in added payload.)

If we call the shim a framework, would you be ok with it then?

If you want import maps to be supported in any browser, there is an ES Module Shims polyfill which is compatible with any browser that has baseline ES Module Support (i.e. Edge 17+, Firefox 60+, Safari 10.1+, and Chrome 61+).

An example of a polyfill that can be used is the ES Module Shims polyfill that adds support for import maps and other new module features to any browser with baseline support for ES modules (about 94% of browsers). All you need to do is include the es-module-shim script in your HTML file before your import map script:

i often use es-module-shims so i can load npm packages in browsers without a bundler 😎

I explored using client-side service workers for build-less deployment workflows a while back, but the blocker was the initial visit when the service worker hasn't been installed yet. Ended up using es-module-shim's fetch hook (https://github.com/guybedford/es-module-shims#fetch-hook) instead, which worked quite well.

I kept the demo repo around here, in case it's helpful to anyone: https://github.com/lewisl9029/buildless-hot-reload-demo.

The repo itself is quite out of date at this point, but my current project, Reflame, is essentially the spiritual successor: https://reflame.app/

Reflame has the same ideals of achieving the developer experience I've always wanted for building client rendered React apps:

- instant production deployments (usually <200ms)

- instant preview environments that match production in pretty much every imaginable way (including the URL), that can also be flipped into development mode for fast-refresh (for the seamless feedback loop we're used to in local dev) and dev-mode dependencies (for better error messaging, etc)

- close-to-instant browser tests (1-3 seconds) that enable image snapshot comparisons that run with maximum parallelism and only rerun when their dependency graphs change

The problem of course is that browser-support for Import Maps is sadly lacking (only Chrome/Chromium-based at time of writing). There are tricks/shims to get around this, like ES-Module-Shims. I find these approaches to be a little too intrusive, personally.

As someone who helped lead the Polymer team in the transition from HTML-first Polymer to JavaScript-first lit-html/LitElement, I have some experience building approaches.

I think that JavaScript-first is far better for templating the more general case (or the lower level foundation) because JavaScript is where your data lives. It's generally much easier to bring markup into JavaScript than it is data and data manipulation into HTML.

In HTML you need re-invent expressions, scopes, control-flow, references, and imports. You're going to spend more time and code implementing a less expressive, slower, and more proprietary system.

In JavaScript you just need a way to describe fragments of the resulting DOM (whether you prefer JSX, function calls, or tagged template literals), and the rest is just JavaScript.

Now, I do see benefit from the HTML-first approach for a lot of people and some use cases. One reason I also push on web components so hard is that with interop comes flexibility in allowing a mix-and-match of approaches. As a side-project I'm working on an HTML-first declarative component system layered on top of LitElement: https://github.com/justinfagnani/stampino-element