import-maps
import-maps | compression-dictionary-transport | |
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45 | 7 | |
2,629 | 90 | |
0.8% | - | |
3.1 | 5.2 | |
5 months ago | 2 months ago | |
JavaScript | ||
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
import-maps
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It is hard to avoid JavaScript
Long time huge fan of JS. I appreciate your calling out the multi-paradigm aspect; having these first class functions & prototype based inheritance has been so flexible.
TC39 has done a great job shaping the language over the years. New capabilities are usually well thought out & integrate well. Async await has been amazing.
The one major miss that makes me so sad and frustrated is modules; js has gotten better everywhere except it's near requirement for build tooling. Being able to throw some scripts on a page and go is still an unparalleled experience in the world, is so direct & tactile an experience. EcmaScript Modules was supposed to improve things, help get us back, but imports using url specifiers made the whole thing non-modular, was a miss. We're still tangled & torn. Import-maps has finally fixed but it's no where near as straightforward, and it still doesn't work in workers, which leaves us infuriatingly shirt of where the past was. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2
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'Mother of all breaches' data leak reveals 26B account stolen records
makes sure your app is getting the download it expects. Adoption is probably pretty minimal though. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...
I think the big thing making this unlikely though is that very few folks use cdns these days. We designed ESM as a module system for the language, but then took a good fraction of a decade to build import-maps, to let us actually use modules in a modular way. Good news, we can finally use modules modularly! https://caniuse.com/import-maps
Bad news? Oh import-maps only works for the simplest case. Doesn't work in webworkers/service workers. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2
The point is that single page apps almost always are bundled together, as using CDNs hasn't even been technically possible.
Also, CDNs are kind of somewhat pointless, now that http caches are partitioned by origin (for security reasons). They might have better anycast infrastructure to get the content out faster, but without the caching there's no inherent advantage. The user will download the same jquery file again in each site they go to, no already having it cached anymore. Bah humbug!
- Rails Frontend Bundling - Which one should I choose?
- ESM dynamic imports
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JavaScript import maps are now supported cross-browser
https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2
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We Added Package.json Support to Deno
Bare specifiers has been the tragedy of ESM. Nice module syntax... that is utterly u deoyable & which has had to have awful de-modularizing specifiers hard-coded into each file to make it work. Abominable sin to introduce "modules" to JS/es2015 then spend a decade dragging everyone along with no story for how to have modular modules.
Import-maps are like "here" to fix this on the web... finally... except they only are shipping to the happiest sunniest easiest case, with Web Workers being totally shit out of luck in spite of some very simple straightforward suggested paths forward. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2
I think Deno is making pretty good tradeoffs along the way here. This looks like package.json at surface level, but there is a nightmare of complexity under the surface. Typescript, ESM, cjs all have various pressures they create & in Node it's just incredibly tight & tense dealing with packaging, where-as Deno's happy path of Typescript first does not slowly tatters one over time. It really has been super pleasant being free of the previous world, and having something much more web-platform centric, more intented, with less assembly & less building, and more doing the actual coding.
I really hope import-maps eventually get broader support. Maybe this long-dwelling webworker issue should be brought up with WinterCG.
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Import maps 101
Import maps proposal
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You Might Not Need Module Federation: Orchestrate your Microfrontends at Runtime with Import Maps
The concept of Import Maps was born in 2018 and made its long way until it was declared a new web standard implemented by Chrome in 2021 and some other browsers.
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Getting an "import file" syntax right for ArkScript
For package managers, you can use something like import maps to let the user specify which path points to what package, and resolve it properly.
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Deno 1.28: Featuring 1.3M New Modules
Huh. I was about to complain that this breaks with web standards, but apparently it's being proposed as a standard feature: https://github.com/WICG/import-maps
Interesting!
compression-dictionary-transport
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Compression efficiency with shared dictionaries in Chrome
> Dictionary entries (or at least the metadata) should be cleared any time cookies are cleared.
So it seems it should not get you anything you cannot already do with cookies.
https://github.com/WICG/compression-dictionary-transport?tab...
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Chrome feature: Compression dictionary transport with Shared Brotli
Talked about here:
https://github.com/WICG/compression-dictionary-transport
- Compression Dictionary Transport
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Improving compression with a preset DEFLATE dictionary (2015)
There's a spec up for custom dictionary support across the web. https://github.com/WICG/compression-dictionary-transport
This was one of the major blockers that iirc Mozilla threw in the way of zstd compression support: they said zstd with a standardly accepted dictionary would be too particular & wanted more. With this spec maybe Moz will accept zstd as a web compression standard.
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JavaScript import maps are now supported cross-browser
Here here. Today, bundlers may get you to first page load faster. But if a user comes back and you've shipped two small fixes, all those extra wins you get from compressing a bunch files at once fly out the window & you're deep in the red. If you have users that return to your site, and your site is actively developed, bundling is probably a bad tradeoff.
We see similar fixedness in the field all over the place: people freaking love small Docker image sizes & will spend forever making it smaller. But my gosh the number of engineers I've seen fixate on total download size for an image, & ignore everything else, is vast. Same story, but server side: my interest is in the download size for what v1.0.1 of the Docker container looks like once we already have v1.0.0 already shipped. Once we start to consider what the ongoing experience is, rather than just the first time easy-to-judge metric, the pictures all look very different.
Then there's the other thing. The performance reasons for bundling are being eaten away. Preload & Early Hints are both here today & both offer really good tools to greatly streamline asset loading & claw back a lot of turf, and work hand-in-glove with import-maps. The remaining thing everyone points out is that a large bundle compresses better (but again at the cost of making incremental updates bad). The spec is in progress, but compression-dictionary-transport could potentially obliterate that advantage, either make it a non-factor, or perhaps even a disadvantage for large bundles (as one could use a set of dictionaries & go discover which of your handful of dictionaries best compress the code). These dictionaries would again be first-load hit, but could then be used again and again by users, to great effect again for incremental changes. https://github.com/WICG/compression-dictionary-transport
Bundles are such an ugly stain on the web, such an awful hack that betrays the web's better resourceful nature. Thankfully we're finally making real strides against this opaque awful blob we've foisted upon this world. And we can start to undo not just the ugliness, but the terrible performance pains we've created by bundling so much togther.
What are some alternatives?
esbuild - An extremely fast bundler for the web
download-esm - Download ESM modules from npm and jsdelivr
es-module-shims - Shims for new ES modules features on top of the basic modules support in browsers
sciter-js-sdk
importmap-rails - Use ESM with importmap to manage modern JavaScript in Rails without transpiling or bundling.
webappsec-subresource-integrity - WebAppSec Subresource Integrity
esm.sh - A fast, smart, & global CDN for modern(es2015+) web development.
quickjspp
single-spa - The router for easy microfrontends
simpatico - Simpatico is an umbrella term for several data-structures and algorithms written in JavaScript
deno - A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript.
proposal-type-annotations - ECMAScript proposal for type syntax that is erased - Stage 1