Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

https://www.htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2025/27/

by soheilpro • 7 months ago

748 284 7 months ago

Input with Autofilter Suggestions Dropdown

It's great until you have a typo in the field, or want to show options that don't start with what you typed in but appear near the end of an option (think Google search's autocomplete). There's no way to filter in Javascript and force it to show certain options with <datalist>. I've resorted to <ol> for search suggestions.

prisenco3• 7 months ago

When building out a new app or site, start with the simplest solution like the html-only autofilters first, then add complex behavior later.

It's good to know these things exist so there are alternatives to reaching for a fat react component as the first step.

willparks• 7 months ago

It’s great to see practical examples that push us to consider what the platform already offers before adding more layers of complexity.

zdragnar• 7 months ago

Until your client tells you that it doesn't work in Edge and you find out it's because every browser has its own styling and they are impossible to change enough to get the really long options to show up correctly.

Then you're stuck with a bugfix's allotment of time to implement an accessible, correctly themed combo box that you should have reached for in the first place, just like what you had to do last week with the native date pickers.

prisenco3• 7 months ago

Right, don't add complexity until you have to.

smlavine• 7 months ago

The Pentagram at the top of the page does not load without JS enabled.

bitbasher• 7 months ago

So it's.. fitting, how meta.

superkuh• 7 months ago

Some of these new HTML features don't fully work in my "ancient" browser. But all of them partially work (ie opening the accordion element doesn't close others but it still opens and closes) and they still remain functional elements I can read and interact with. This puts them far ahead of any javascript implementation which almost universally fail to nothing.

ravenstine• 7 months ago

What "ancient" browser are you using?

vpShane• 7 months ago

Probably something 300 CVEs ago.

eleventen2• 7 months ago

The details / summary thing absolutely kills me. There’s basically nothing you can’t do with them. Hiding and replacing markers is easy. But every component library just pretends they don’t exist.

It even saves you the effort of all the aria control and expanded tags: these tags don’t need them.

webstrand• 7 months ago

Details works even when it's set display:contents too, for even more flexibility. Can't animate from open›close, yet, though. That's pretty much my last frustration with it.

shakna• 7 months ago

I think the CSS support for that has finally landed, though it means targetting a pseudo element instead. Its been a year, so support is probably good enough you don't care if just the animation doesn't happen.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/styling-details

raybb• 7 months ago

Do they work well for when you want to preview text? Like show the first 100 characters of a paragraph and then click to expand?

veqq• 7 months ago

Of course. That's the summary part

zahlman3• 7 months ago

Yes. For example, on Codidact (https://codidact.com), limited HTML access is offered along with Markdown when making posts, and the details and summary tags in particular are whitelisted. I've made extensive use of this in some of my content, for example https://software.codidact.com/posts/289251/289252#answer-289... . If you have NoScript you can easily verify that the expanding sections work perfectly well without JavaScript. They can even be nested, as they are here; and the summary text can contain some other forms of markup without issue. (When crafting the post, however, I had to do some tricky things with whitespace to avoid confusing the Markdown parser.)

crooked-v4• 7 months ago

You can't actually control the open state properly from markup (the `open` attribute only sets the default state), which is why I haven't bothered with them.

eleventen2• 7 months ago

Out of curiosity, why have you needed to? This has never come up for me.

bikeshaving• 7 months ago

I’m not sure this is correct. The DOM class HTMLDetailsElement has the `open` property, which you can use to read/write the details element’s state. If you’re using setAttribute/getAttribute just switch to the property.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLDetails...

rhdunn2• 7 months ago

If you specify the same name on each `details` element they behave like an accordion automatically [1], no need for JavaScript. If you set one of them to open that one will be initially open.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/html-details-exclus...

maxloh• 7 months ago

The details / summary thing absolutely kills me. There’s basically nothing you can’t do with them.

Animating the details element is tricky. By the spec, browsers don’t natively support transitions between display: none and display: block.

qudat• 7 months ago

Animating accordions is almost always a bad idea because the content length can make it unbearable.

In general I find animations on the web overused and unnecessary

jakelazaroff9• 7 months ago

That is no longer true! You can do it in CSS with a combination of `@starting-style` and `transition-behavior: allow-discrete`. [1]

Another gotcha you'll run into is animating the height. A couple other new features (`interpolate-size: allow-keywords` and `::details-content`) will let you get around that. [2]

Modern CSS is awesome.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/entry-exit-animations

[2] https://nerdy.dev/open-and-close-transitions-for-the-details...

computerfriend• 7 months ago

You can put a transition on details > summary.

lelanthran• 7 months ago

Animating the details element is tricky. By the spec, browsers don’t natively support transitions between display: none and display: block.

Very hot take; then don't animate them!

Animation in a UI is great - you draw the user's attention to a widget that changed because they might not necessarily notice it otherwise. This improves the UX.

With a details/summary, the animation is not needed and can only make a negative change to the UX. There is no positive change to the UX that animating the details/summary elements would bring. When it is opened it is obvious.

If you really really need to animate the details, instead of animating open/close, instead animate the summary background/text color to indicate that the element has just changed state.

Would I like easy animation of open/close? Sure. Does it improve the UX? Nope.

stephenr• 7 months ago

browsers don’t natively support transitions between display: none and display: block.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

danw1979• 7 months ago

Does it need animating ?

rado• 7 months ago

You can’t force it to be always open on desktop and collapsible on mobile. That was a deal breaker for me.

sunaookami• 7 months ago

When you search text with ctrl+f it also searches inside details elements and automatically expands them!

dspillett• 7 months ago

Ooh, that sounds useful as a pretty mix-in-bad-data method for scrapers. Have a few of these tags do if junk, even though they are hidden it'll look to a scraper that cares about hidden/not like they aren't always hidden so are likely to contain something worth adding to their DB…

I'd need to look into what effect this might have on accessibility, but my gut says "very little".

PhilipRoman• 7 months ago

Fun fact: <details> even works on github and similar sites with markdown-based input. You can post large inline logs in issues without cluttering the conversation.

sesm• 7 months ago

I used this for a long time, and only now realized that I'm using html embedding, not some hidden markdown feature.

chiefalchemist3• 7 months ago

Last I checked that without JavaScript details / summary has accessibility issues. That is, you need JS to add aria-open or similar.

It’s odd and frustrating that such an essential tag is not defined to be accessible, afaik.

asdfaoeu• 7 months ago

Why would you need aria attributes if it's summary tag?

extra885• 7 months ago

That's not correct. There is no aria-open attribute and the summary implicitly has the correct ARIA state, aria-expanded, indicating that its details element is either expanded or collapsed.

There have been bugs in its implementation, particularly in Safari and differing between mobile and desktop Safari.

WickyNilliams3• 7 months ago

One drawback of details was that cmd+f search wouldn't play nicely when the details was closed. But now there's a hidden="until-found" you can put on child content, along with an associated event. So you can open the details when a user searches :) super useful

MrJohz2• 7 months ago

You don't need the hidden="until-found" for details/summary, because that has those semantics automatically, but you can use that for other elements that behave similarly (for example tabs, which can't quite correctly be implemented with details/summary, and so needs to be done by hand).

Also I think the event isn't currently emitted consistently on all browsers (and maybe not at all for hidden="until-found"?) so unfortunately you can't quite rely on that yet if you need to sink some JavaScript state to your html. But in general, yeah, this is a really cool feature.

tapirl6• 7 months ago

The details / summary feature can also be implemented with pure css without JavaScript. Here is an example: https://docs.go101.org/std/pkg/io.html, just click all "+" signs to expand contents.

We can also use pure css to implement tab panels. A demo: http://tmd.tapirgames.com/demos.html#section-demo-4

Modern css is powerful.

xorcist• 7 months ago

What is a good reference to learn modern CSS? I seems most books and online resources are quickly outdated.

jakelazaroff9• 7 months ago

Note that pure HTML and CSS implementations of tabs using <details> and <summary> fail to meet several important accessibility criteria [1].

While you can make something that visually appears to act as a set of tabs, building it accessibly unfortunately still requires JavaScript.

[1] https://adrianroselli.com/2019/04/details-summary-are-not-in...

egeozcan• 7 months ago

I needed to recreate it recently because summary element does not allow headings inside, because it has a button role.

only-one1701• 7 months ago

Something I keep thinking about when I consider the trade-offs between building a site with HTML/CSS wherever possible vs JS is what the actual _experience_ of writing and maintaining HTML/CSS is vs JS. JS gets knocked around a bunch compared to "real" languages (although less so in recent years), but at the end of the day, it's a programming language. You can write a loop in it.

Writing a web server in C++ is a way to get excellent performance. So why don't most people do it?

breve• 7 months ago

Writing a web server in C++ is a way to get excellent performance. So why don't most people do it?

Because they already wrote it in C.

Apache and Nginx are both written in C. Together they run 57.7% of all web servers:

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server

yurishimo4• 7 months ago

JS got popular because some devs were trying to realize a world where the same code can be shared on the front and backend. I think on the surface, it was a noble goal with good intentions. Having only one programming language to handle is going to create some efficiency gains when you work in a large company with thousands of devs who all need training want to share knowledge as a larger organization.

In the past decade, we went full JS as an industry and now we’re starting to swing back. Server side interactivity like Phoenix Liveview, C# Blazor, HTMX, PHP/Laravel Livewire, Rails Hotwire, all of these are different abstractions around JS to make interoperability between the frontend and backend more manageable and they’ve come a long way to closing the gap. Advancements in HTML/CSS standards also deserve credit for closing the gap but we’re still not quite there yet.

But at the end of the day, the web is dynamic. As new tools and techniques are discovered, the industry will continue to evolve and certain “hacks” will become new standards and ignorant newcomers will reinvent the wheel again to achieve some crazy interactive design because they didn’t know any better! And it wil work, mostly.

Until the way we interact with browsers changes, I feel that we’ll continue to bolt on new features over time and the web will continue to evolve. Just like the iPhone, a surge of use of smart glasses could change the computing paradigm or perhaps its some other device entirely.

So you can (and should!) try to optimize for today, but trying to optimize for tomorrow will always carry the risk irrelevance if the market pivots quickly. Bleeding edge is risky but so is falling behind.

suprjami2• 7 months ago

Gimme a dark/light mode switch. CSS is allowed.

johnisgood• 7 months ago

Checkbox and :checked are your friends.

adzm• 7 months ago

Use a checkbox, d. Define vars for light mode. Override when checked for dark mode with body:has(#d:checked) and can include the dark mode media query too

zahlman3• 7 months ago

See https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45056878 (which discussion contains some deeper explanation).

tisc• 7 months ago

Why would you build a switch instead of relying on the user’s system settings? The only reason I can imagine is that your dark/light mode is not usable/readable so it forces the user to switch

trnglina• 7 months ago

I often use different light/dark settings between apps and my system. Just because I want system UIs to be dark, for example, doesn't mean I want to read long pages of white-on-black prose on your blog.

yurishimo4• 7 months ago

Having it default to the users preference is nice, but you should still provide an override. I sometimes use my browser in light mode while my OS is dark mode. Many times, I find the contrast for dark mode websites too low unless I’m in a totally dark room.

wiseowise• 7 months ago

Because I don't want to toggle my whole system theme based on one special website.

suprjami2• 7 months ago

My specific usage is a site to host my own internal training content.

I want to read it in dark mode and give users that option, but I want to present it in light mode because dark mode suffers poorly from video compression when screen sharing.

I currently have a JS toggle for it which uses local browser storage, but ditching JS would be nice if possible.

ronbenton• 7 months ago

One thing I am quite hopeful for is customizable selects! It's in WHATWG stage 3 right now. I have seen so many horrors with javascript-based custom dropdowns components. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/a-customizable-select

odie5533• 7 months ago

The Popover API looks really cool. Could see it for tooltips or lightboxes.

cantalopes• 7 months ago

The problem is that it's difficukt to style or animate those things. Unless you're builsing something for dun or technical where it's not important it's fine but i doubt any real world commercial project would be satisfied with just this

overflowy• 7 months ago

HTML and JavaScript serve distinct purposes, making better or worse comparisons logically flawed. Complex/interactive web apps requires JavaScript, period. Attempting to build sophisticated apps solely through HTML (looking at you HTMLX) eventually hits a functional ceiling.

mcny• 7 months ago

It shouldn't have to be this way though. There is no reason html can't do things it needs to do to build complete apps. We could use reasonable defaults to allow a new type of html markup without JavaScript.

All the http verbs. Decent html input controls What else?

imbusy111• 7 months ago

I assume you mean htmx. It doesn't have to be either/or. You can supplement htmx with Javascript.

The core idea with htmx is that you transfer hypertext with controls and structure built in, not just a JSON blob that requires additional context to be useful.

I have just shipped a very useful and interactive app surprisingly quickly for my customer using just htmx with a little Javascript.

ksec2• 7 months ago

I dont think anyone is arguing Google Earth should be pure HTML. But it is equally false you cant do Gmail with HTML only.

There are things that HTML could do, and should be doing, that is not done or not yet possible simply due to hype and trend from browser vendors. We could continue to polish HTML + sprinkle of Javascript to its absolute maximum before hitting JS Apps. Right now this is far from the case.

llmslave25• 7 months ago

Gmail with html only would not be a nice experience. Modern gmail is really bloated but it's actually one of the few web apps I have no problems with.

thunderbong• 7 months ago

Gmail used to provide an HTML version. It got removed only recently

65108• 7 months ago

Actually, I do think that. Wouldn't it be lovely to have an image format for truly enormous images and have the browser request only the chunk currently visible? It could just be a container format with jpg's in it. Let the file system figure out that x/y means tile number 56436.

You could provide multiple image versions for zooming to get to the TB scale.

Computers are really good, performance is astonishing, no reason why we should never be able to use a TB size image. Never is a really long time.

Have epic panoramas, detailed scans from paintings, extremely easy game design and maps that just work.

atoav• 7 months ago

Depends on how complex it is meant to be. Just like many wordpress sites that could easily have been static websites, many javascript heavy sites could have easily just have been using htmlx.

If your need really, goes beyond what htmx offers, then you may need Javascript. But in my experience people tend to use the tools they know for their job, not the tools that would be best suited.

nchmy5• 7 months ago

FYI, it's easy to cache the html output of a WordPress site, resulting in essentially a static site with graphical admin, page builder, and all the other bells and whistles.

FormerlyEL• 7 months ago

A pleasant surprise to see Aaron's post here, we worked together for a bit on frontend optimization in a multi-tenant international ecommerce platform. That work was a large part of my inspiration for building https://contentblocksjs.com which encapsulated a lot of the JS concerns into web components.

dpedu• 7 months ago

I didn't know about <datalist>, but how are you supposed to use it with a non-trivial amount of items in the list? I don't see how this can be a replacement for javascript/XHR based autocomplete.

reed1234• 7 months ago

If we can hand-off any JS functionality to native HTML or CSS, then users can download less stuff, and the remaining JS can pay attention to more important tasks that HTML and CSS can't handle (yet).

psnehanshu• 7 months ago

You can't. It's only supposed to be used for a limited list.

lelandfe4• 7 months ago

Don't use it, it totally blows. For another oddity to not use, check out the multiple select: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Expecting users to press modifiers when clicking on these is so funny.

Hendrikto• 7 months ago

Expecting users to press modifiers when clicking on these is so funny.

I mean… 5 year olds can figure out shift-click in Minecraft.

Kwpolska• 7 months ago

And even if you allow XHR and add options to a <datalist>, it still has terrible UX.

JodieBenitez• 7 months ago

I don't see how this can be a replacement for javascript/XHR based autocomplete.

It can't do complex autocomplete. It's ok for simple cases only. I use it with a 25k long list to ease the input. Works well enough for this.

econ4• 7 months ago

I'm so not impressed by the toggle implementation... How nice it could have been.

Nesting the elements is a truly hideous choice. The summary is part of the details?? I thought they were opposites.

Should we also put the headings in the <p> from now on?

Identifying a target should be done by id or by name. That it does use a name because js can't target it without makes it even more stupid.

We already had labels for form fields. Inventing a completely different method for something very similar is a dumb idea. The old checkbox hack is more flexible and less ugly for some implementations.

Why force the hidden content to be below or above the toggle? We aren't gaining anything with this.

What is this nonsense for an element to not just be hidden or displayed but to have some weird 3rd state where only one of its children is shown?

How should styling it even work for this new state? If I apply a style to the hidden content it must also apply to the link? The text is hidden but the style is visible??? Preposterous!

Don't try style <details> to avoid unexpected behavior. Try wrapping the hidden content in a new element to make it behave normally.

What is this ugly arrow? If you find 1000 websites using a toggle I doubt there is one using an ugly arrow like that.

The default styling gives no clue about it being clickable?

The pointer (awkwardly called the cursor) choice is the text selection?????

Blue underlined "more" is what everyone does and everyone is used to. The cursor should be pointer. (This is css speak for "the pointer should be a hand")

The number of js toggles you can find online where the button lives inside the hidden text is guaranteed to be zero. Forget about drop in replacement, you will have to reinvent your css.

Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page. I would have been impressed if that was supported. Personally I use actual links and disable default action in the listener if js is enabled/working or modify the state on the server if js isn't available/working.

It would have been great if the toggle action was implemented as a simple attribute something like toggle="element name" so that anything can be clickable and anything can be toggleable. Have a "closed" as well as an "open" attribute for the target.

Doesn't seem very hard. An open/closed attribute would be useful for other things too. Using display:none is terrible as display: is used for many things.

zahlman3• 7 months ago

Nesting the elements is a truly hideous choice. The summary is part of the details?? I thought they were opposites.

It gives them a semantic connection. Last I checked, HTML isn't really based on giving special meaning to combinations of sibling tags. A summary is part of the thing that conceptually requires detailing.

If you find 1000 websites using a toggle I doubt there is one using an ugly arrow like that.

I think the default looks fine. But TFA clearly explains right there that it can be styled. (Specifically, by styling ::before on the summary tag.)

The default styling gives no clue about it being clickable?

You asked what the arrow is, and then asked about the lack of indication that the summary header is clickable. The arrow is exactly that indication.

Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page.

If you scroll, should the fragment automatically update as you scroll past anchors? I think I'd find that quite annoying.

econ4• 7 months ago

Thanks for your thoughts.

It gives them a semantic connection.

I understand the logic but I don't agree with it.

An element should be visible or not be visible. There shouldn't be a 3rd state. It is a new idea and it is bad. Try writing a polyfill.

Even if you insist it shouldn't be the only way to use it. There should at least be a <summary for=""> so that the clickable thing can be put wherever one likes.

The goal is to make things convenient for the user not to sacrifice usability for some semantics.

But if it was a summary is not semantically part of the details.

I don't actually care about that, I just want to use it.

A summary should be allowed to have hyperlinks. I passionately hate clickable paragraphs but if you are going to do that at least change the pointer into a hand.

I could put the <summary> under the summary the way almost everyone does but then the name makes no sense.

I think the default looks fine.

A summary (longer than a few words) starting with an arrow looks weird.

The arrow would be reasonable UI for fold out menus but those are not summaries.

I would want some margin on the left for the <details> of the sub menu.

What I don't want is to also have padding on the parent(!) menu item. Seems like a very confused parent child relationship.

> Maybe I'm dense but I also want my url to reflect the state of the page.
If you scroll, should the fragment automatically update as you scroll past anchors? I think I'd find that quite annoying.

Depends, if the thing is infinite scrolling and the user needs to send a permalink it would be nice to update it.

If I have an accordion with say frequently asked questions it would be necessary to link to the items.

It often isn't needed but I can't really picture when it would be annoying.

adamzwasserman• 7 months ago

"I also want my url to reflect the state of the page... It would have been great if the toggle action was implemented as a simple attribute something like toggle='element name'"

Your wishlist (state in attributes, URLs reflecting page state, anything being toggleable via simple attributes) is basically describing an architecture I've been working on called DATAOS (DOM As The Authority On State).

The core idea: instead of JS owning state and syncing to DOM, flip it. State lives in HTML attributes. JS just listens for changes and reacts. Want toggle state in the URL? The DOM attribute is the state, so serializing to URL is trivial.

It won't fix <details> being weirdly designed, but it's a pattern for building the kind of declarative, attribute-driven interactivity you're describing.

Free book and open source libraries if you are curious: https://dataos.software/book

anidsiam• 7 months ago

Your blogs have very small amount solution, but the JS use cases are very large. How this little replacement can do more thing? I usually like the idea of being using as lean as possible, if it's can be possible to do more thing just with HTML and CSS that's obviously cool. Is it really possible to replace JS with HTML in near future?

BTW the toggle solution (expanding content) is good.

montroser• 7 months ago

Most of this is great, except for the input/datalist bits, which are not sufficiently functional to be used in any real scenario. Users expect these interfaces to be tolerant of misspellings, optional sub text under each option, mobile ux niceties, etc -- and so everyone builds this with js...

kmoser• 7 months ago

My main beef with datalist is that there's no easy way to show and allow only text (e.g. Beverly Hills), but have the actual value selected be a number (e.g. 90210). In other words there's no analogy to <option value="90210">Beverly Hills</option>.

swiftcoder• 7 months ago

Each <option> element should have a value attribute... It can also have a label attribute, or, missing that, some text content, which may be displayed by the browser instead of value (Firefox), or in addition to value (Chrome and Safari)... The exact content of the drop-down menu depends on the browser, but when clicked, content entered into control field will always come from the value attribute

This seems... underspecified. Not ideal that Chrome/Safari aren't aligned with Firefox here, and that there is no standard way to only display the label

[from]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

tosti• 7 months ago

That and there's no HTML way to interactively load results. Or are you really going to serialize half a million records to HTML and transfer it all every time the relevant block is added to a page? What if it sits in the header or footer templates?

sevenseacat• 7 months ago

And styling! The default styling of datalists in most browsers is just ugly.

singpolyma33• 7 months ago

Open an issue with your browser or OS

ilaksh• 7 months ago

On my android phone it just didn't show anything in the drop downs.

skeptic_ai2• 7 months ago

Try on a phone, it doesn’t work. Now that’s you create html only and no js you need to test all kind of devices to see quirks and try to fix it. And you’ll end up with more hacks to fix other devices and you end up adding Js. And you’ll have html only and html with js. With is much worse that just properly do it in js.

I can see the op is a js hater even tho he keep saying he’s not. Anyway doesn’t matter. Just a small note.

benhurmarcel• 7 months ago

Also datalist is nice but most the time we need a “select” (so users can’t submit anything not in the list), but select doesn’t have search/filtering like datalist has.

TheFlyingFish• 7 months ago

Technically native selects do have a very rudimentary form of filtering: start typing text with the select focused and it will auto-select the first matching option.

E.g. if the select is a list of US states, type "N" and it will jump to Nebraska. Continue into "New" and you'll get New Hampshire, etc.

This is better than nothing (and I personally use it all the time) but not a patch on an actual proper select-with-filtering which, yes, you still need JS to implement properly.

65• 7 months ago

It feels like some variation of this post gets submitted here every week.

Y-bar• 7 months ago

And it will continue until node_modules shrinks!

ozim• 7 months ago

That’s a bit of evergreen topic. “stop bloating web with js” comes up fairly often and there are those people who think they found a solution and everyone should start using whatever they imagine is “best for everyone”.

In my opinion most of those people struggle with whatever they encountered in ecosystem and just want to find a way that fits them - while also trying to make others do the same.

*“You didn’t want to make things perfect. You just hated things the way they are.”*

scrame4• 7 months ago

yes, because most everyone dreads working with javascript, which is why there is so much tech built around not dealing with it.

Izkata• 7 months ago

Does it bother anyone else that it links to Codepen instead of just putting them on the page?

Like I get this is a blog system but it still feels odd, especially for a "use this plain HTML"-style post...

acomjean• 7 months ago

It doesn’t really bother me.

It seems to link to the authors codepen. If you us code pen you can bookmark the snippets. Codepen colorizes the html/css etc.

Link rot is a thing though, so it’s not always ideal to have dependencies on third party urls staying the same.

nchmy5• 7 months ago

Bothered me greatly. Should have done on-page AND a link to codepen for you to play with

skeptic_ai2• 7 months ago

So much about html only that makes me load 2mb of code pen and heavy ui to see the example. Yeah it’s terrible ux. same as most of the examples are bad

Sephr• 7 months ago

I don't see any mention of HTTP 204 or multipart/x-mixed-replace. Those are both very helpful for implementing rich JavaScript-free HTML applications with advanced interactivity.

iammrpayments3• 7 months ago

I was trying to rewrite some UI library with html sometime ago following the W3C accessibility specs and found out a lot of patterns can’t be done with pure html and require javascript unfortunately.

scrame4• 7 months ago

like what?

iammrpayments3• 7 months ago

Tabs, accordion, combobox. There is a whole lot more, these are just the ones I can remember now.

fnord77• 7 months ago

<blink>

Dwedit• 7 months ago

Nobody tell them about how much stuff can go into SVG. That can even be inlined within HTML source code.

yurishimo4• 7 months ago

And you can target it with css! Slap a class attribute on a path element; it’s fine!

troad3• 7 months ago

Plain HTML is very cozy to me - I came of age in that era. Marquee tags 4eva.

But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS. If you want, say, a model form that manages its children as well, you're basically going to end up with a 2003-era ASP-feeling application with way too many views and forms (as seen on your employer's current HR system). Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.

I dislike modern JS to the extent that I opted for Phoenix LiveView, just so I could achieve interactivity without ever having to touch JS, but in truth it's not a comprehensive solution. Still had to write a web worker, a bridge to handle things like notifications, etc. Plus the future direction of Phoenix, all in on AI, is worrying.

Honestly, I should probably just swallow my disdain and learn to appreciate and use modern JS, as painful as that sounds. I want to write and release cool things, not get caught up in navel-gazing language wars.

faitswulff• 7 months ago

I haven't used it in anger myself, but if you know Elixir and Phoenix you might like Gleam, which compiles to Javascript.

troad3• 7 months ago

I appreciate the helpful reply, but I think this is precisely the kind of indirection I need to avoid. I'm a sucker for elegance. If left entirely to my own devices I'd probably design a language / write a transpiler of my own, and wind up with exceedingly elegant tooling for websites, and no websites. :)

wild_egg• 7 months ago

Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.

You're overthinking htmx then. I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.

Server always has authoritative state and code is dead simple to reason about.

troad3• 7 months ago

You're overthinking [noun]

Yes, almost certainly!

I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.

Good trick! My only experience of HTMX in production entailed porting Stimulus code, hence the partials, but your approach is obviously much neater. I'll give it a shot, next time it might be suitable.

bigstrat2003• 7 months ago

But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS.

I would certainly agree that using a little JS can get you further than just HTML. But I think that a plain HTML page is far more pleasant to use (and thus, functional) than the JS monstrosities that dominate the Web today. There's a reason people use the NoScript addon: because a whole lot of website designers use JS in ways that make the experience a ton worse for the user.

llmslave25• 7 months ago

It's not an either/or. Modern Javascript is actually really nice to write and use, and you can write it in a tight, minimal way that doesn't bloat the page or slow it down.

zarzavat• 7 months ago

There's a reason people use the NoScript addon

To be snarky, do they? The average user doesn't even know what JS is.

Users want websites that are fast and solve their problems, with a good UI. They don't care how it's made.

Make websites that people enjoy using. A good developer can do that with any set of tools, though a no-JS approach is limited in scope.

nashashmi• 7 months ago

OT: marquee tags were a missed opportunity to implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same.

I have been trying to find other more commonly known UI patterns that could be done natively. The time has long come for tabular data to be put into HTML tables just by referencing the source. Xslt almost did that. Another one is integrating xml http requests with native html. I think HTMz came close to this.

assimpleaspossi• 7 months ago

There's a usability and design issue with that as you lose what you're reading as it scrolls off the screen. Also, scrolling is a styling issue and not a document description issue which is what HTML is for.

Note: <marquee> has never been part of any HTML standard since the beginning except the current one which only has it for the purpose of marking it obsolete so people will quit using it.

65108• 7 months ago

Sounds great <table type="text/csv" src="mydata.csv"> Then have it generate actual html so that you can target th's, tr's and td's with css.

I believe the lowest hanging fruit would be <div src="article.html">

I think formData should also be available as interactive JSON but perhaps it is possible to also populate a form with fields from a json with something like:

   <form src="mydata.json">
     <table>
       <input name="baz" type="number">
     </table>
   </form>

Where mydata.json is:

   {"foo" : "bar", "baz" : "42"}

And have something like this come out:

   <form><table>
     <tr>
       <td><label for="foo">foo</label></td>
       <td><input type="text" name="foo" value="bar"></td>
     </tr>
     <tr>
       <td><label for="baz">baz</label></td>
       <td><input type="number" name="baz" value="42"></td>
     </tr>
   </table>
   </form>

It wouldn't cover everything but it is very nice not to have the later if you don't really need it.

moritzwarhier• 7 months ago

marquee tags were a missed opportunity to implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same. I have been trying to find other more commonly known UI patterns that could be done natively.

Are you sure you are talking about the functionality of the marquee tag? What exactly do you mean by "implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same"?

For a banner-type text "Sale: 50% off until New Year" I can imagine this. And this is possible with almost no JS, by using a CSS animation on translateX. I think you need to pass the initial width of the content one time from JS to CSS via a custom property IIRC, and update that variable on resize, for example using a ResizeObserver, to avoid a jump when reaching the "wrap around"...

But – sorry if this a misunderstanding – I have a sneaking feeling that you might also have things in mind like swipable horizontal lists etc?

This is also possible using CSS in theory (scroll-snap and overflow-auto, and CSS to hide the scrollbars). But last I tried to use it, it simply wasn't good enough to sell it, compared to a fat JS library that did the trick, perfectly, on mobile and desktop.

When it comes to UX niceties, I feel it's pretty common to have HTML+CSS solutions that are good enough in theory, but suck in practise.

For the horizontal scrolling with "snap", I would also like a good JS-free solution. But I feel that the more interactive and complex the UX patterns become, it would be senseless bloat to build a specific implementation into the platform.

I think that "autocomplete" inputs are a good example for this, as discussed in another thread.

I once tried to implement a custom autocomplete using datalist (including dynamically updating the list with xhrs). In the end, the native element had so many issues that it was a waste of time and a JS solution was way better. At the time, that JS solution was Alpine.Js, because it was a b2b app with minimal a11y requirements and JS-allergic developers.

Within an hour, I was polishing keyboard use while the "near-native" solution using datalist was broken in a thousand different ways in every browser and in the end didn't work well at all.

abustamam3• 7 months ago

I miss marquee... I burned more tokens than I'd like to admit to build a marquee-like feature in react and it was really just the same text twice with an animation that hopefully no one notices isn't a clean loop on some viewport sizes (since it restarts after reaching the end).

avodonosov• 7 months ago

I am reading the CodePen example for summary/details. Especially the CSS part.

Its so easy, like a breeze!

hn111• 7 months ago

I’ve tried replacing my modal components with the <dialog> element, but had to reverse everything due to this issue: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9936

In short: you can’t have an interactive popover (e.g. a toast notification) on top of a dialog modal.

I’d love to use the new native elements but we’re sadly not quite there yet.

shahzaibmushtaq• 7 months ago

This is helpful when development revolves around static environment.

busymom0• 7 months ago

I really try not using JavaScript unless absolutely needed. On my latest project, the whole site actually functions without JavaScript and is server side rendered. However, there's some small piece which I really needed JavaScript for couple reasons.

Basically, I have a site which collects the top STEAMD posts from places like HN, lobsters, tildes, slashdot, bear, reddit etc and displays them in chronological order. I wanted a way for users to block posts with certain keywords or from specific domains. I didn't want to do this server side for both performance reasons plus privacy reasons. I didn't want users to need signing up or something to block. I also didn't want to collect block lists for privacy reasons. So, I resorted to using JavaScript and local storage. All posts within the filter for the date are sent and JavaScript is used to block posts with keywords before displaying. So my server never knows what keywords are blocked.

Site for anyone curious:

https://limereader.com/

petit_robert• 7 months ago

Interesting. Nice way to get headers quickly, I'll have a look.

Fun project I'm sure, but out of curiosity, is this something that you can monetize somehow? because the fun only goes so far.

backtogeek• 7 months ago

Brilliant I will be adopting a few of these, I have been on a personal quest to reduce js use recently, I feel like I spend more time debugging js than producing the end result.

Theoleff4• 7 months ago

The interesting part here isn’t “no JavaScript”, it’s that HTML already covers more use cases than people remember (forms, dialogs, validation, navigation).

I ran into this repeatedly while writing my book "You Don’t Need JavaScript"[0]: most JS in these cases isn’t adding capability, it’s compensating for forgotten platform features.

[0] https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/

danieloj• 7 months ago

Agreed! I assume the reason for the forgetting of the features is that at least some were poorly supported when first released so developers create workarounds that then become the de facto standard.

It has been amazing to see the speed up in release and support of new CSS features over the last couple of years! Even the masonry layout has finally reached an experimental stage

Theoleff4• 7 months ago

Yup, at this point it feels more like habit than necessity. People learned to build things like dropdowns in JavaScript years ago, so they keep doing it that way.

A lot of devs simply don’t look any further when it comes to what HTML and CSS already provide.

shimman2• 7 months ago

Very interesting book! These are the types of programming books I wish that were more abundant rather than "Learn X framework/language," those that solve/discuss interesting problems. Just bought a copy.

kitd• 7 months ago

Indeed the "Learn X" books may even have a vested interest in not revealing rarely used features, so that you learn to reimplement them in X.

Theoleff4• 7 months ago

Thank you, it means a lot!

I originally started writing it because I was tired of books becoming obsolete every two years while the underlying problems stayed the same.

levmiseri• 7 months ago

A missed opportunity to not have all of these examples inline. The page/blog-post would be so much more convincing if it utilized all of these HTML replacements instead (or in addition) to linking to codepen.

dvh• 7 months ago

Absolutely mind boggling. I've seen it many times before. There's some FooMaker v1.0 announced and you click on it thinking it will allow to easily make Foo and the example is how to disable FooMaker's lights l while AC is running or some other obscure edge case that affects like one in a million people, no examples how to actually use it for most common use case or how the result look like.

itishappy2• 7 months ago

I had assumed this was a 25 year old article at first glance. Those dithered gifs sure are a throwback!

nfrmatk• 7 months ago

I was also frustrated to find the examples weren't inline, but I think this is a guest blog post which makes it a bit more understandable.

hollowturtle3• 7 months ago

I don't want to be so negative, but we got details and popover after literally decades, and we still have datalist presented as a plausible option? Html is so underdeveloped and the first we all agree on that the first we'll pretend from committee real advancement

65108• 7 months ago

The committee is an unsolved puzzle as old as mankind. That's not to discourage you. If you do solve it it would remedy almost all of our problems. If the solution could be found instantly in 5 seconds someone would have solved it already. This one is going to take some actual thinking and modeling.

hollowturtle3• 7 months ago

I know for sure that Apple, who has an important seat on the standard committee, holded back innovation for so long, it's not a matter of finding or not finding solutions. They're failing us for different interests

vijaybritto• 7 months ago

What would make this super easy to adopt?

A simple page which shows what native components are available with/without the need for polyfills for a given browserslist config

thayne• 7 months ago

It seems like an oversight that there isn't a native way for a popover to be activated by hovering over the target element.

Cort3z• 7 months ago

I love semantic html. It feels so much more modern and efficient than all of these fashion-driven front end tools.

bodash• 7 months ago

Just been through several frontend interviews in the last few months, where it's clear that they still judge a developer's JS skills (especially React) than being semantically correct on HTML elements.

Every question/exercise is centred around how well you know React hooks, effect, memoization, modern css-in-js etc. Given I've been working with Astro recently, in one interview I talked about DOM APIs and I can see the interviewer raise an eyebrow. In later stage, even I that passed the exercises, still didn't get the job.

oceansky• 7 months ago

Having a separate css file make small components so much cleaner. I am not against tailwind, but I wouldn't want to use it in front-end interviews.

rokkamokka• 7 months ago

Remember that a large part of hiring is finding someone who fits in an existing team. A team that uses react won't appreciate someone choosing to use native DOM APIs instead of a react component.

christophilus• 7 months ago

Eh. I build apps with Preact, but I prefer candidates who know the core web platform. They’ll be more apt to use the right tool for the job and not be baffled by edge cases.

abustamam3• 7 months ago

In every React team I've been part of we've wanted to use as little react as possible and use native DOM apis when possible. React would be used purely for state management or interactivity.

I feel like teams that have used react enough learn that the less React you can use the better :) it's a great tool, but most teams use it because it's all they know and they don't know what they don't know about html.

shimman2• 7 months ago

Weird comment, I'm a web dev that has been using react for 10+ years and I prefer using native browser features whenever possible. I'd honestly avoid hiring framework specific devs because the skills required are never about just one single framework.

Also this is just all JS + HTML here, let's not act like it's impossible to learn the most popular frontend tool at the moment.

halfmatthalfcat• 7 months ago

Because nobody outside of the HN-sphere cares about HTML purism, nor should they.

jspdown• 7 months ago

It's not HTML purism. It's simply recognizing that HTML and CSS have evolved a lot and many things don't need (or are close to not need) JS anymore. This shouldn't be taken as an anti-JS article, everyone benefits from these gradial improvements. Especially our users who can now get a uniform experience.

augustk• 7 months ago

Progressive enhancement is the way to go if you care about technical excellence. For some reason it fell out of fashion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

_heimdall4• 7 months ago

It fell out of fashion because the entire web was consumed by react.

petepete• 7 months ago

if you care about technical excellence

Or accessibility.

herpdyderp• 7 months ago

Before anyone wastes a lot of time like I did trying to use the popover API: it is not ready yet. You can do very basic things in all browsers but positioning is still different and/or totally broken per browser.

senfiaj• 7 months ago

Yes, HTML & CSS alone won't replace JS. Of course, for complicated form validation HTML is not sufficient. But IMHO it's very important to provide basic functionality in HTML / CSS as much as possible / reasonable. Moving the functionality to HTML / CSS can potentially improve the SEO.

As for positioning, there is an experimental feature @position-try. Here I made a small demo where it handles overflows.

https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-29/css-features-web-dev...

But yeah, that's kind of limited if you need nice animations or some other complicated thing. Although it's fun.

extra885• 7 months ago

Yes, popover's uses are limited without CSS anchor positioning but it will be supported in all major browsers very soon.

In the meantime, there is a polyfill to load in browsers without support.

https://caniuse.com/css-anchor-positioning

Devasta• 7 months ago

JavaScript is the primary language of the web, HTML is just the payload carrier.

I don't want it to be this way, but HTML has nothing approaching even one tenth the ambition of XSLT and XForms.

If HTML were proposed today, you would be laughed out of the room.

nasso_dev• 7 months ago

i like the points the article makes, but i really wish it used looping videos instead of actual GIFs

i don't really see any reason to use GIFs here; any widely available video codec like H.264, VP8/VP9 or AV1 will result in significantly smaller file sizes, look better, and will allow enabling controls for seeking and play/pause

zaidf• 7 months ago

The problem is that CSS continues to be a pain in the ass, even as it evolves. There is no other reason why something like tailwind should have the traction it has.

edwardtay• 7 months ago

The <details> and <summary> elements are great, but I think the bigger missed opportunity is the lack of inline examples/demos on the page itself. Would be much more powerful to actually show these working rather than linking to external codepens.

A few thoughts on the practicality:

1. Progressive enhancement is the real win here, not "replacing" JavaScript. These HTML features provide a baseline that works without JS, then you enhance with JS for better UX (animations, state persistence, etc.)

2. The details/summary approach breaks down when you need: - Custom animations/transitions - State synchronization across multiple elements - Analytics tracking on user interactions - Keyboard shortcuts beyond basic tab navigation

3. What about the <dialog> element? That's another underutilized HTML feature that could replace a ton of modal/popup JavaScript.

4. Have you explored the Popover API? It's getting broader browser support and handles a lot of common UI patterns without JS.

The spirit of "use the platform" is great, but the title feels a bit clickbaity - you're not really replacing JS, just avoiding it where unnecessary. Which is good practice anyway!

conception• 7 months ago

The switch from everything tables to everything divs was one of the worst for usability on the web. Every day I run into a table of data that doesn’t sort, copy/paste, search, resize columns or any of the very trivial items to do with tables. It always infuriating.

peesem• 7 months ago

why are people so obsessed with restricting details/accordion elements to only one open at a time? let me open what I want to

zenmac• 7 months ago

One good thing about NOT having JS is what the page can function in Tor Browser's "Safest" mode!

A step down is to have JS only on your domain. "Safer" mode.

Try to avoid web site that require "Standard" to view and run properly.

cess11• 7 months ago

In my mind "Just HTML" does not include CSS.

hinkley• 7 months ago

I was stuck on the backend while CSS3 absorbed most of the functionality of Less and Sass and now I’m trying to play catchup. If there had just been a CSS4 I’d be able to find a tutorial to teach me everything I missed in the interim.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 7 months ago

"Nothing against JS, but it has better things to do than setup and manage your accordions or offscreen navigation menus... "

Perhaps this is referring to "things" such as data collection, surveillance and ad services

It would be interesting to see how Big Tech and other adtech companies would accomplish the same level of data collection, surveillance and ad services without the use of Javascript

As for "nothing against JS", I think some web users (cf. "developers") who dislike adtech and the ad-laden web they perpetuate might have something against it

littlecranky67• 7 months ago

My personal pet-peeve everytime a "you don't need JS" post comes up on HN, is the disconnect between the interface designers and the developers. In my dayjob as a (mostly react) freelance contractor doing B2B and LoB apps, there are always UX designers coming up with the screen- and interface designs. I don't think any project I ever were, could have matched a screen design I was passed without JS. Whether it being business requirements (has to work in IE, or nowadays has to work in Edge), or simply hard visual design choices.

My favorite example is that of a date, date-time or date-range picker. Yes, there are HTML native elements. But they look absolutely ugly, styling only goes so far, and good luck with requirements such as "oh, but in the popup on the date-range picker, add a topbar with 3 buttons that trigger preselection and a dropdown". Now you can argue and communicate back that we save a lot of technical complexity in the stack if we stick to the HTML native solutions. But all those discussions basically end up managers and UX designers having no clue about the actual complexity and savings (time and money wise for future maintenance) and simply don't care.

And if I am the one telling them "Look, in the HTML native date-time picker, you can't add custom elements, you can't fully customize every bit and piece of behaviour so change the screen designs" they will just fire up random corporate website XYZ and show a similar version of what they have in mind (and it is always JS-based) and suddenly it looks like me being unable or unskilled to achieve something, that is clearly doable as others have done it.

Now not all is nice and shiny in the JS/React world. We use MaterialUI in a current project, and the commercial MUI-X DatePickers. They also come with their limitations, but it is just they are far more powerfull and customizable to actually meet the requirements and demands of UX and management, compared to the HTML versions.

srikanthdotch• 7 months ago

Most people think that you should remove JavaScript to load your sites faster or for reasons like that. You have to learn to balance things, always use it if you need some good interactivity, validation etc. Don't try to use HTML only to force things.

Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

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