1loc | Favorite JavaScript single line of code

The Main Thread Is Not Yours — Den Odell

Every millisecond you spend executing JavaScript is a millisecond the browser can’t spend responding to a click, updating a scroll position, or acknowledging that the user did just try to type something. When your code runs long, you’re not causing “jank” in some abstract technical sense; you’re ignoring someone who’s trying to talk to you.

This is a great way to think about client-side JavaScript!

Also:

Before your application code runs a single line, your framework has already spent some of the user’s main thread budget on initialization, hydration, and virtual DOM reconciliation.

Custom Asidenotes – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

An excellent example of an HTML web component from Eric:

Extend HTML to do things automatically!

He layers on the functionality and styling, considering potential gotchas at every stage. This is resilient web design in action.

Write Code That Runs in the Browser, or Write Code the Browser Runs - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

So instead of asking yourself, “How can I write code that does what I want?” Consider asking yourself, “Can I write code that ties together things the browser already does to accomplish what I want (or close enough to it)?”

AI is Stifling Tech Adoption | Vale.Rocks

Want to use all those great features that have been in landing in browsers over the past year or two? View transitions! Scroll-driven animations! So much more!

Well, your coding co-pilot is not going to going to be of any help.

Large language models, especially those on the scale of many of the most accessible, popular hosted options, take humongous datasets and long periods to train. By the time everything has been scraped and a dataset has been built, the set is on some level already obsolete. Then, before a model can reach the hands of consumers, time must be taken to train and evaluate it, and then even more to finally deploy it.

Once it has finally released, it usually remains stagnant in terms of having its knowledge updated. This creates an AI knowledge gap. A period between the present and AI’s training cutoff. This gap creates a time between when a new technology emerges and when AI systems can effectively support user needs regarding its adoption, meaning that models will not be able to service users requesting assistance with new technologies, thus disincentivising their use.

So we get this instead:

I’ve anecdotally noticed that many AI tools have a ‘preference’ for React and Tailwind when asked to tackle a web-based task, or even to create any app involving an interface at all.

Moving on from React, a Year Later

Many interactions are not possible without JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean we should look to write more than we have to. The server doing something useful is a requirement for building an interesting business. The client doing something is often a nice-to-have.

There’s also this:

It’s really fast

One of the arguments for a SPA is that it provides a more reactive customer experience. I think that’s mostly debunked at this point, due to the performance creep and complexity that comes in with a more complicated client-server relationship.