> Developers need to reach for a library, and thus tools like npm or a CDN, to do many basic things. This adds to the overhead of getting started. It makes simple static files and devtools less useful than they could be. There's no fundamental templating knowledge that's portable between stacks, and native DOM creation APIs like innerHTML are unsafe by default.
Remember when you could just drag an html file into your browser, and it would work? No build step, no package install, no web server, just vanilla html+css+javascript?
It would be nice to get to do that again, and the more we move things like .querySelector out of libraries like jQuery and into native browser APIs the better, imo.
That should ideally be the highest calling of frameworks like Lit and packages like Lodash - to be so good that they prove indispensable, and ultimately go native.
The answer to this is both "never gonna happen" and "you already can."
You already can ship a React app in pure JS and even import modules via ESM in the browser from CDN. Performance will suck but you can.
You'll never be able to actually have a complex web app that you can just drag into the browser. As the base API expands, so do the ambitions.
Heck we've had PHP 4 years after HTML just to fill in some blanks, people will always want more than static code.