yhtml VS es-module-shims

The main reason is that they're too low-level to use directly.

They do a lot, but stop just short of being useful without something of a framework on top. I tried hard to use them directly, but found that it was untenable without sensible template interpolation, and without helpers for event binding.

Here's my shot at the smallest possible "framework" atop Web Components that make them workable (and even enjoyable) as an application developer:

https://github.com/dchester/yhtml

It's just ~10 SLOC, admittedly dense, but which make a world of difference in terms of usability. With that in place, now you can write markup in a style not too dissimilar from React or Vue, like...

    ${this.count}

I also sometimes enjoy this approach of starting from absolutely nothing.

Instead of taking the path of starting with DOM manipulation and then going to a framework as necessary, I've kept really trying to make raw web components work, but kept finding that I wanted just a little bit more.

I managed to get the more I wanted -- sensible template interpolation with event binding -- boiled down to a tag function in 481 bytes / 12 lines of (dense) source code, which I feel like is small enough that you can copy/paste it around and not feel to bad about it. It's here if anyone cares to look: https://github.com/dchester/yhtml

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.