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Discussion on: Why to use React if HTML/CSS/JS works fine?

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mukuljainx profile image
Mukul Jain •

For static websites where there is not much of interaction or very less, Vanilla JS is totally fine and should be used instead of a framework! As for a user a framework mean more load time (downloading + parsing). But for a complicated app for e.g. Dev.to itself creating it with only JS will be a headache and a lot more work, you might end up creating mini-React! to ease your work. Even with JQuery it's totally possible but it will be harder. Easier than Vanilla but harder than React. You can think of React as a lot of helper functions making the development easy!

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pengeszikra profile image
Peter Vivo •

I have only to choice: Vanilla JS + CSS - that for really size dependent small app for example : banner where you can optimize much as possible. jQuery total forget - really don't used long time ago. Every other case - the React is really small and fine choice: that means a single JSX file plus standard index.html like:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <title>- - -</title>
</head>
<body>
  <div id="base"></div>
  <script src="./index.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
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plus complicated jsx

import { render } from 'react-dom';

render(<pre>react-base-hello-message</pre>, document.getElementById("base"));
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May you found really slim react base working setup

With nice parcel boundler setup which is also good for Vannilla JS if remove react and react-doom from packagejson

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mukuljainx profile image
Mukul Jain •

No matter how small React is, it will still bring something do the table and it's about 41kb gzipped (react + react-dom) thats a lot, so a plain JS is better for small work like you mentioned btw also checkout preact (never personally used) it's way smaller with and sufficient for a lot of use cases.

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pengeszikra profile image
Peter Vivo •

Yes preact is smaller react, and I work with them around 3 years, and its fine! But in my use case : complex scientic desktop application that few kb. isn't count, however larger React compatibile libraries still important.