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Comment by toastercat | Hacker News Reader

You can usually browse npm for what you need, and when you want to use it, look at unpkg.com/<name of package>

Usually this will give you a .min.js file ready for you to script include on your site, for example, unpkg.com/mithril

Sometimes library authors don't default the export to a browser ready minified version or ESM module, in which case, you can snoop around the built package at unpkg.com/browse/mithril/.

Most READMEs worth a damn should tell you how to use their libraries without npm if possible. Unfortunately, a lot of library authors suck.

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> Unfortunately, a lot of library authors suck.

The nerve of them not catering to the small percentage of use cases for a project they often do in their free time and often for free. The entitlement is real.

Sorry I forgot we're not allowed to criticize open-source maintainers ever. But as a library author myself, it takes less than 10 seconds to add such a section in my README.

Unpkg just serves the raw files, which may contain require() calls or import from other npm packages. That won’t work.

The closest service is https://esm.sh, but you can’t download from it.

Unpkg serves whatever is published to NPM, and if it's a library intended for the browser, that often includes minified versions ready for use in script tags, for example, https://unpkg.com/mithril@2.2.2/mithril.min.js. Sometimes the default export is CJS (which has require() calls), in which case, you can usually use the browse url that I mentioned to see if there's another export you can use.

https://esm.sh/ is definitely a good option too if you're OK with modules.

Yeah but that's rarely the case, you can't offer that as a generic "solution" to the problem at hand. It's just Mithril's choice to both publish to npm and to officially link to unpkg. Packages can make different choices, like publishing to GitHub releases or just to include the file in the GitHub repo.

The reality is that only frameworks and very popular browser-specific packages do that.

I said "often", but you say "rarely", so I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree here. :)

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