Week 423 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2025-12-07.
I find myself taking an anti-JS, pro-CSS approach in my personal projects. The modern web has moved on in ways I couldn't imagine over the past decade but frameworks appear to dominate the way in which a lot of developers approach web development.
When I was prototyping an app idea, I didn't know how to approach an algorithm in SwiftUI so asked ChatGPT for the answer in JavaScript. It took a lot of prompting to avoid using any framework, including JavaScript.
I'd love to see more focus on the native web being the gold standard for web development. Frameworks often prove their worth on massive projects of for projects with large teams behind them, but often they're wrong tool to reach for.
I've not recruited for a while, but I thought this entire chat between Kevin Powell and Adam Argyle was really interesting. It certainly got me thinking about how to approach the task in the future, but the bit that really stuck out to me was Adam's comments about his approach to a choice that he could make during a coding challenge.
He decided to rely on vanilla JS and not REACT to really showcase what he could do and it turns out that REACT would have been a safer bet with his audience. Only his audience didn't know what was capable already on the modern web without a framework in between.
I've embedded the video at the right place here:
Don't get me wrong, as my career was starting there was plenty of reliance on JavaScript and Flash but in almost every case it had to degrade gracefully as it wasn't a given that either would be available.
I remember building a UI in Flash and then replicating it in pure HTML, JavaScript and CSS as a fallback and then also handling the non-JS phase too. This was before the Navigation API existed too but I cared about users and progressively made the experience better for those that had opted in.
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