I stumbled upon a great site which acts as an explainer for vanilla web development techniques called, well, Plain Vanilla.

When I was starting out as a developer I had a hard time learning the basics of the web platform because so many resources and examples used a framework. It was mostly jQuery at the time, and today I’d assume React and Tailwind are the most common starting points for new developers.

But the web has come a long way! A framework might not be necessary for lots of projects, and going as far as you can with the grain of the web comes with lots of benefits. I’m happy to see a high quality resource like this that can help folks avoid complexity and start simple.

I really appreciated this write up from Jeremy Keith about his personal approach and best practices for HTML web components.

Judging by the discourse, web components seem to be gaining in popularity lately, and I’m very here for it.

Trying to build on the web using a component model was what led me (and others I’m sure) into the arms of React many years ago. While I’m grateful for that journey, and still believe React is the right choice for many projects, it gives me a lot of comfort to know there’s a native tool I can reach for.

The tricky thing with web components, like the web platform in general, is the flexibility. What makes it so powerful can also make it hard to learn, and even harder to know if what you’re learning is the right or recommended path. It takes time for best practices to form and percolate.

We’re seeing a surge of platforms self-sabotaging and choosing to suddenly restrict access to their content. These are all blatant attempts to trap users by digging a moat around the communities that they’ve created.

I can think of 3 obvious reasons why this might all be happening now as opposed to any time over the past decade:

1. The content on social media platforms is valuable for AI training, and platforms want to capitalize on or keep that value for themselves.
2. The recent, high-interest-rate environment has companies cutting costs in ways they might not before, and subsidizing API access for third party developers is no longer a bill they’re willing to foot.
3. The bad behavior of platforms is creating a more competitive environment as new challengers spring up (Bluesky, Posts, Mastodon, and Threads all come to mind).

Those seem obvious, but are they really the cause? Is it one more than the other? Or something else entirely?

I wonder how much of this trend is really just a domino effect of CEOs realizing that they can get away with screwing over their users because they saw Elon Musk (or some other robber baron) get away with it.

On the Formidable blog, Luke Jackson shares how you can develop a React app today with no build step by taking advantage of the platform’s latest features.

This doesn’t excite me because it will change the way that we build apps (it likely won’t for a while), but because of how it will change a developer’s ability to get started creating new websites that use tools like React. In the not-too-distant future, “vanilla” web development will look a lot like how we develop the web at scale. The barrier of entry will be lower than ever before.