Github.com refuses to use jQuery and switches to pure JavaScript
Today, Mislav Marohnić announced that the Github developers got rid of jQuery on the GitHub.com front end. It would seem that in this fact there is nothing remarkable, if not for one interesting point.
The problem of choosing a new framework for the frontend was solved radically - it was decided to do without frameworks in principle. The following tools were used instead:
In addition to Custom Elements , it was decided not to use anything else from the Web Components . The developers looked closely at the Shadow DOM and would not mind resorting to it - however, due to the fact that on polyfills the speed of searching in the DOM leaves much to be desired, they had to postpone this idea for now.
Why did the developers, in principle, need to do all this? According to them , in order to “give” visitors less kilobytes, be able to use a more pronounced syntax to perform manipulations with the DOM, as well as the ability to use Flow.JS library for static type analysis. According to the developers, the process of leaving jQuery took years.
Eddie Osmani from the Google Chrome team appreciated the fast speed of work and loading of the new version of the site Vanilla pjax came to
replace the jquery-pjax plugin , which is “sharpened” specifically for Github, is equipped with improvements and is closely related to the code base - unfortunately, the code used by the Github library version unlikely to be open due to the difficulty of supporting it in the future.
By the way, Github lays out many of its web components in open source - you can see them by reference , in the future the list will expand. For browsers that lack native support for fetch , a custom polyfill was written in Github ; for delegation of events the library is useddelegated-events . Both libraries are available under the MIT license.
The problem of choosing a new framework for the frontend was solved radically - it was decided to do without frameworks in principle. The following tools were used instead:
- querySelectorAll (which was supposedly inspired once by jQuery),
- fetch for working with AJAX,
- delegated-events to handle events
- DOM polyfills
- custom items ( the Custom Elements ), which is on the rise.
In addition to Custom Elements , it was decided not to use anything else from the Web Components . The developers looked closely at the Shadow DOM and would not mind resorting to it - however, due to the fact that on polyfills the speed of searching in the DOM leaves much to be desired, they had to postpone this idea for now.
Why did the developers, in principle, need to do all this? According to them , in order to “give” visitors less kilobytes, be able to use a more pronounced syntax to perform manipulations with the DOM, as well as the ability to use Flow.JS library for static type analysis. According to the developers, the process of leaving jQuery took years.
Eddie Osmani from the Google Chrome team appreciated the fast speed of work and loading of the new version of the site Vanilla pjax came to
replace the jquery-pjax plugin , which is “sharpened” specifically for Github, is equipped with improvements and is closely related to the code base - unfortunately, the code used by the Github library version unlikely to be open due to the difficulty of supporting it in the future.
By the way, Github lays out many of its web components in open source - you can see them by reference , in the future the list will expand. For browsers that lack native support for fetch , a custom polyfill was written in Github ; for delegation of events the library is useddelegated-events . Both libraries are available under the MIT license.