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Comment by sholladay | Hacker News Reader

Deno has so many other great features. Most web standard APIs are available in Deno, for example. It can do URL imports. It has a built in linter, formatter, and test framework. Built in documentation generator. A much better built in web server.

Node is copying many of these features to varying degrees of success. But Deno is evolving, too.

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the url imports is one the things I don't want.

There are also the `npm:`, `node:` and `jsr:` specifiers now. So you don't have to use the URL imports if you don't feel them.

You want to be forced to use a centralized registry? I don’t know. URL imports also enable fully isomorphic modules. I think you would enjoy the freedom of URL imports if the ergonomics were better. For example, it should just default to https:// so you don’t have to type that. Import maps also help a lot with this, definitely use them. But they could be even better by having first-class support for templating the module version into the URL so that the version can be stored separately, alongside the module name. Popular hosts with well-known URL structures could have their URLs automatically templated so you only have to specify the host and not the rest of the URL.

In other words, the tooling could be better, but the fundamentals of URL imports are sound, IMO.

I disagree. It should not default to "https://" (I think defaulting to local files would be better).

Furthermore, I think that it should be made so that the "hashed:" scheme that I had invented (in the Scorpion protocol/file-format specification document, although this scheme can be used independently of that) can also be usable.

And, popular hosts with well-known URL structures automatically templating also I would disagree, although it might do to allow any expressions in place of the string literals and then add functions for abbreviations of some of those URLs, if that would help (although I still think it is unnecessary).

yes, I would prefer to use a centralized registry indeed. However, that's not actually what i'm talking about here. Even just decoupling the import from the package is enough. You can already do this by by pointing a package in package.json to a remote tarball or git repo.

Node supports URL imports via the --experimental-network-imports command line option. There's also a built in test runner now.

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