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You might not be able to make your web app with zero, but chances are it needs a lot less.

Look at Old Reddit for example; it used Javascript for inline comment reply textboxes and for expanding sections of the tree. With it turned off, everything else still worked. Of course, that's gone now.

Do you really need three megabytes of JS to replace the whole page with the video player when I click on a video, or is <a href="/video/foo"> enough?

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I mean obviously it depends, a lot of that 3mb is probably doing all sorts of ad and tracking stuff which, well, welcome to the internet. There's a point where trying to avoid JavaScript and build tools is just plain harder (especially with large teams) than like, a basic react app with typescript. You can use astro or just render out HTML and serve that. No reason to not use the tools you're already familiar with. If it's a webapp, the demands of complexity on the app mean you almost certainly need a framework (especially working with a team) to manage that. If it's a blog, if you make the active choice to make it slow and painful to load as a developer and put in the work to add all that bloat, it doesn't matter that much anyway?

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