"we’re now able to drop jQuery as a dependency", interesting
For me jQuery is mainly about an elegant, chainable API and all the DOM tools I'm likely to need on hand.
I understand there's a bit of bloat but there's also lighter jQuery-alikes.
I tried vanilla js recently and the native DOM APIs are fairly ugly in comparison with none of the quality of life stuff I got used to.
What am I missing?
> The point is that one framework should not depend on another.
It's not hard to think of counterexamples unless you have very particular definitions of "depend" and "framework.
But if you'll admit the terms get murky in the middle then I think it's not controversial to assert that a framework can depend on a library without it offending the gods.
So we're very quickly in the territory of "things reasonable people could disagree about" and quite far away from "glibly asserting that something isn't even up for debate".
As arguments go, it doesn’t get any clearer cut.
More fundamentally, interdependency is a disease infecting the entire JS ecosystem. The antithesis is the antidote.
But I personally don't use it anymore since a while now. I either use React/Next + Redux if they are a good fit, or just plain native JS otherwise. JQuery doesn't solve enough of a problem (anymore) for me to be worth loading and adhere to.
If I do the latter then my code is often structured the same (per module).
- defining some utility functions
- setting up state and state-transformation / "top-level" functions
- getting the DOM elements (once)
- defining DOM mutations on those elements based on the state, usually call these "render" functions.
- registering event handlers on those elements which call the top-level functions and pass the new state to the render functions.
I know this is kind of a dumb/rigid approach, but it suits me well. There is not much obvious use for jQuery here. The only place where the nice chaining API would be useful are the DOM mutations (sometimes) but I haven't found this to be a huge deal.
As soon as I need to do more AJAX, inserting/removing whole Nodes/NodeLists, have more involved state management and policy then jQuery doesn't help anyways and a more sophisticated framework is more fitting (like React/Next + Redux).