Build a Frontend Web Framework (From Scratch)

2 Vanilla JavaScript—like in the old days

This chapter covers

• Building an application using vanilla JavaScript and HTML
• Creating DOM elements programmatically
• Using the Document API to manipulate the DOM

Before you can understand the benefits of using a frontend framework, you need to understand the problems that it solves, and there’s no better way to gain this understanding than to write an application without a framework. That is, you should do the framework’s job yourself. The objective of this chapter is to make you suffer the pain of writing applications without a framework so that you can build some appreciation for the job that frameworks do for you.

In the old days (I’m not that old, but technology evolves fast), developers ...