Sure, but the runtime is not exactly designed to guide you to the best way to do this. Hence the prevalence of frameworks to paper over the runtime.

I openly admit that I'd rather learn a new framework than touch anything to do with figuring out how the browser is intended to behave in practice. What an abomination and insult to humanity.

Oh no, you're part of the problem :(

yes, probably, even maybe

But what's the problem again?

"Nobody knows how to do anything and shit is inefficient and slow and why does all of this software suck" - customers of things built using frameworks but no understanding of the system being abstracted

Backwards compatibility, which is kinda important on the web. It should be possible to build a website and have it just work a decade later.

Huh? The built-in APIs aren't perfect, but we're talking about something simple as

``` fetch('/my-content').then(async res => { if(res.ok) { document.getElementById('my-element').innerHtml = await res.text(); } }) ```

Something like that. Doesn't get much easier. Gone are the days of browser inconsistencies, at least of you stick to "Baseline Widely available" APIs which is now prominently displayed on MDN.

No-framework web tinkerer here. If I had a nickel for every second of my life I've spent typing document.getElementById, I'd be able to afford new fingers. Should've been renamed to getId() and put in global scope two decades ago, if not three. At least querySelector() is a few characters shorter, but I always feel bad using such an alarmingly overdesigned tool for anything trivial.

You don’t have to call getElementById or querySelector on document. You can narrow the search by starting at a specific node, just most people default into document as it’s already a global.

> You don’t have to call getElementById or querySelector on document.

You do have to call `getElementById` on a document. There can be many documents in a window.

Ah yes correct on getElementById, especially as every id must be unique.

> especially as every id must be unique.

Although a very consistent convention, there are no guardrails put in place to prevent something from setting the same id on two or more elements.

getElementById will return the first element that it finds with the id, but you can't know for sure if it is the only one without additional checks

If I'm just adding sprinkles of interactivity to a statically-rendered page for something that vanilla is good enough for (i.e. minimal-to-no display logic), I use the expando giving an element an `id` adds to `window`:

    <textarea id="userNotes"></textarea>
    <button type="button" id="copyButton">Copy</button>
    <script>
    copyButton.addEventListener('click', () => {
      navigator.clipboard.writeText(userNotes.value)
      copyButton.innerText = 'Copied'
      setTimeout(() => copyButton.innerText = 'Copy', 1000)
    })
    </script>

Why are you writing it so many times? Write an alias in 10 seconds?

function getId(v) {return document.getElementById(v)}

Dev tools allows $ $$, dunno, make a macro?

But if Brendan Eich wanted us to have a shorter name, he would have given us a shorter name!

We must not defy the system!

As I said to Lex Fridman, I was influenced by AWK. Ragrets!

Sorry?

JavaScript has functions:

    const g = (x) => document.getElementById(x);

That's a code smell. If you're creating the element you ought to already know about it. If you're not creating the element you should inventory them all at once as the page (or component) loads.

...what is this simple compared to?

I guess openly admitting that you refuse to learn how your platform actually works is an "earnest approach", of a sort, but so is admitting that you routinely leave grocery carts in the parking lot and don't see a problem with it.

Theres even an insane amount of documentation on the web about the web. MDN is very well maintained to boot. Im not as versed as some on front end web, but I recognize that I can slice through a lot of front end stuff by just referring to MDN.

I have a few sites that aren’t that complex, and I use JS to run a PHP file and populate the results in a div. It appears reactive, but it’s dead simple.

I get that huge apps probably need a lot more than that, but so many people these days reach for heavy frameworks for everything, because it’s all they know.