Well, thanks for the framework :)
Apparently, you missed my (now deleted) question:
> It would be nice if you could document the browser requirements.
We're even, since I had missed the answer, which lies at the very end of the misc section of the documentation:
> Mithril allows developers to support browsers all the way back to IE6 and Blackberry.
Wow! This should IMO be on the home page.
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Agreed! I'm in!
As I said, Angular and Backbone use jQuery. So you're just comparing how you've used jQuery (as if that's how any jQuery user would do it) to how they've used jQuery. There is no such thing as "idiomatic" jQuery templating. There are only plugins and libraries that use jQuery to do templating. In fact, what you've done in the jQuery rendering test is incredibly bad practice and is greatly discouraged in the jQuery community. Again, your tests don't make sense.
If you need me to explicate my pointer further, the jQuery "security test" is you asking jQuery to do something stupid and it following orders. It's absurd. You might as well add a native test saying that document.documentElement.innerHTML = "a\"><img src=\"javascript:;\" onerror=\"alert('alert box should not appear')\">"; has a security hole. How dare the browser do what I said!
Stop comparing jQuery to MVC frameworks.
The technical implementation of the jQuery test is flawed on purpose, and that's the point. People make mistakes, some don't know better.
Are you arguing that every jQuery dev team in the world audits their code for stuff like:
- bla.text(firstName + " " + lastName)
+ bla.html(firstName + " " + lastName) // bug fix 1234: make name not wrap
Like it or not, jQuery is the big elephant in the room, so yes, I'm going to compare to it, to the extent where it makes sense. Is it an apples to apples comparison? No. Neither is the comparison w/ React. But those comparisons are useful to some people, so I provide them.
Sure, that's a fair point given that my explanation in the homepage is skimpy. I did try my best to word it in a way not to diss jQuery as a project: "if you see an alert box, ensuring security with that framework is more work for you". If you have a better idea on how to phrase this point, I'm open to suggestions.
Nobody's using jQuery only to build large single page apps,that's not true. Comparing jQuery which a DOM manipulation library to any framework that manage the application lifecycle is dishonest.
It would be like comparing underscore to AngularJS,makes no sense.
Back to the point, jQuery and Mithril are more similar than your analogy tries to make it sound. jQuery does AJAX/CORS and Deferreds and .data() and a whole lot of non-DOM stuff that people use when building their apps. There's some stuff that doesn't map like jQuery animations not having a Mithril counterpart or Mithril routing not having a jQuery-core counterpart, but that's cherrypicking the stuff that is different and saying "look, they're different!", while ignoring the similar, comparable aspects.
Also, I'm not sure how familiar you are w/ underscore or Angular, but both have a templating system and utilities to work with lists of data, so there are definitely points that can be compared. These comparisons are really not at all like comparing something like restangular to hoverIntent, so implying that they're equally imcomparable seems like the dishonest and non-productive argument to me, imho.
@stronglikedan: I don't have plans for extending the core (in fact, keeping it small and modular is a major focus point for me). I do have a list of things I want to tackle next (see the roadmap page), but I'll most likely release them separately from core.
@hcho: re: integrating w/ jQuery: see the integrating w/ other libraries page in the guide section. There's a simple example w/ select2 there.
@abjorn: those are excellent points. Re: turing completeness: my take is that things like good error messages in the view layer are more important than trying to prevent people from doing stupid things (that's what code reviews are for). Re: Bindings: I'm most familiar w/ Angular ones and yes, their bidi-bindings are really convenient, but they fail in some 5-10% of the use cases for me (either by being too aggressive or not expressive enough). So, that's a conciseness vs power trade-off in design from my personal experience. Re: templating, you can take the model-level utilities and integrate w/ other templating libraries. I do provide some comparisons w/ React and a few other frameworks in the misc section of the guide, as well as design rationales in the main guide page. TL;DR I use other frameworks full-time and I've done homework before I settled on the current implementation :)
@hanburglar I do provide a tool to convert HTML to Mithril (although not automated yet), see the "useful tools" page.
@timmiwil: you're right, jQuery is not MVC (I mention this in the comparisons page). The point is that with idiomatic jQuery, the app developer is responsible for knowing when to use .text() instead of .html(), whereas with, say, idiomatic Angular, that's not a concern, ever. jQuery "templating" tends to get pretty hard to audit as widgets become more complex (see select2 source code, for example)
@tzaman: I do contribute to Angular and other projects that I use as time permits (mostly bug reports)
@BaconJuice: it's a side project, but a scratch-an-itch one that I work on pretty much every night. Planning on continuing work on it for the foreseable future. I'm also considering introducing it at my day job as well.
@all: thank you for the feedback, I really appreciate :)