> Imagine you decided to start developing websites today, how do you even start?
You learn vanilla HTML/CSS/JS (I think Mozilla has good courses on those). After making a few websites that way, you learn Svelte and you live happily ever after.
Avoid React, NextJS at all cost especially since many of these new frameworks actively try to screw over new developers with PaaS.
It's funny to think back now that JSX had such a strong negative reaction on launch. That's the one thing from React I love - having a declarative and strongly typed markup for HTML in my JS/TS code.
I think React peaked with hooks around 2019. I write most of my front-end with the smallest 'React-like' library possible (Preact) using only functional components, and with as little 'magic' from useEffect etc. as possible.
I like to stay close to 'raw' HTML/CSS/JS when possible, but the web platform APIs are just a little to clunky and verbose for me without the JSX abstraction.
The Getting Started docs recommend against using vanilla React and nudge you towards NextJS and similar frameworks because you're gonna end up needing that stuff eventually https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project
So new projects have to actively not follow the recommended approach in the docs if they want to use vanilla React.
It is not very different from mustache, or other older template engines and it's really needed because there is no conditional html rendering, loops etc in the HTML spec itself, I like that more than how Vue does.
But otherwise, Svelte has a very low surface, everything else is just standard vanilla JS/Html, also one thing that Svelte has over other frameworks is that vanilla JS libraries just work, no need for a wrapper any.
Some devs point at Svelte and say, “not many libraries, it can’t be very good!” What they don’t realize is it doesn’t need a cottage industry of tiny adapter libraries, JS stuff works fine.
You learn vanilla HTML/CSS/JS (I think Mozilla has good courses on those). After making a few websites that way, you learn Svelte and you live happily ever after.
Avoid React, NextJS at all cost especially since many of these new frameworks actively try to screw over new developers with PaaS.