Come to think of it, I should write up the techniques I use, too...e.g. I have simple wrappers around querySelector() and createElement() with a bit of TypeScript gymnastics in a JSDoc annotation to add intellisense + type checking for custom elements.

Would you be open to a pull request with a page on static analysis/type checking for vanilla JS? (intro to JSDoc, useful patterns for custom elements, etc.) If not, that's totally OK, but I figure it could be interesting to readers of the site.

And agreed on vanilla/dependency-free not being a silver bullet. There aren't really one-size-fits-all solutions in software, but I've found a vanilla approach (and then adding dependencies only if/when necessary) tends to help the software evolve in a natural way and stay simple where possible.

If you do it long enough, presumably you start to develop your own miniature "framework" (most likely really just some libraries, i.e. not inverting control and handing it over to your previous work). After all, it's still programming; JS isn't exceptional even if it has lots of quirks.

Anyway, love the website concept, just a quick petition: would it be possible to apply some progressive enhancement/graceful degradation love to <x-code-viewer> such that there's at least the basic preformatted text of the code displayed without JS?

Depending on the use case, minimizing dependancies can also decrease attack vectors on the page/app.

Of course, it also means you have to be cautious about problems that dependencies promise to solve (e.g. XSS), but at the same time, bringing in a bunch of third-party code isn't a substitute for fully understanding your own system.

I have worked at employer, where one could have done the frontend easily in a traditional server side templating language since most of the pages where static information anyway and very little interactive. But instead of doing that and have 1 person do that, making an easily accessible and standard-conforming frontend, they decided to go with nextjs and required 3 people fulltime to maintain this, including all the usual churn and burn of updating dependencies and changing the "router" and stuff. Porting a menu from one instance of the frontend to another frontend took 3 weeks. Fixing a menu display bug after I reported it took 2 or 3 months.

From human society's PoV, you sound like a 10X engineer and wonderful person.

But from the C-suite's PoV ...yeah. You might want to keep quite about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

The idea of reactivity started in the 1990's in production.

When Gmail was released this technology is what made a website behave like a desktop app (plus the huge amount of storage)

If we were to look into today's equivalent of doing this, it might be surprising what exists in the standard libraries.

that's in contrast with the sort of stuff that invariably shows up when something falls over somewhere in a dependency:

    cannot access property "apply" of null
    at forEach()
    at setTimeout()
    at digest()
    at callback()
    at then()
    ...