4 karma · joined December 8, 2025
It sounds like a perfect solution, a futuristic key to unlock any digital door. But is it real? Can AI actually "find" a password you've forgotten? We went down the rabbit hole to find the truth.
- For ""derived values from DOM on demand"", what do you do when the derived value is expensive or used in multiple places. Do you just accept recomputing, or do you have a pattern to keep it from turning into lots of repeated DOM reads. -And for bigger interactions like table row selection, keyboard navigation, drag and drop, does your approach still model that as DOM attributes and queries, or do you keep a small in memory store for that kind of state.
The MutationObserver tips are useful too, scoping and attributeFilter feels like the difference between this being neat and this being a footgun. I will take a look at the repo and the book. Thanks
So, I have two quick questions though, because this is where I always get nervous: - First, where do you draw the line between DOM state that is fine to trust and app state that should still live in data, like validation errors, derived values, server driven defaults, stuff that needs to be consistent across SSR and client. - Second, how does the MutationObserver part behave when things get busy. If a page has lots of inputs or updates, does it stay cheap. Do you scope it per form or per component, or is it one observer with filtering.
Either way the 2KB no deps thing is a flex, dropping a link is fair, people can decide if they want that model. I am going to skim the repo.
After I finally measured what I was shipping, I realized most of the client code was not adding value. It was just making hydration heavier, breaking accessibility, and hiding simple HTML solutions.
The post walks through the process I used to cut around 80 percent of the JS without going full “no JS”: listing real interactions in human language, leaning on native elements like details and dialog, using bundle analyzers, and deleting dependency creep. It also shows the small performance and accessibility checklist I use now.
I want to see how many unique playlists this community creates.