Stop writing JavaScript frameworks

JavaScript frameworks seem like death and taxesinevitable and unavoidable. But that's not the way it needs to be, and actually, it must stop. Joseph Gregorio outlines the Zero Framework Manifesto and discusses his implementation experience building and shipping framework-free applications for the past two years.

For a long time, the web platform—the technology stack most succinctly described as HTML + CSS + JS—was, for lack of a better term, a disaster. Who can forget the IE box model or the layer tag? I’m sure several of you started twitching with flashbacks to the bad old days of web development with just those words. During this time, there was a whole lot of inconsistency between browsers, and we, as an industry, had to write frameworks to paper over them. But over the past 10 years, browsers got better. Their support for standards improved, and now there are evergreen browsers—automatically updating browsers, each version more capable and standards-compliant than the last. With newer standards like HTML Imports, Object.observe, Promises, and HTML templates, it’s time to rethink the model of JS frameworks. There’s no need to invent yet another way to do something. Just use HTML + CSS + JS. Joseph Gregorio outlines the Zero Framework Manifesto and questions whether or not you should be using a JavaScript framework for web development. Joseph explores the alternatives available and discusses his implementation experience building and shipping framework-free applications for the past two years.