LinksJavaScript

I must admit I've never questioned what happens when I use navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition. As it turns out, browsers use third-party services to figure out the user location. Very obvious, in hindsight.

But geolocation isn't the only "Web API" calling online services. Kilian lists more than a handful and summarizes the current state:

The promise of web standards is that you write code once and it works everywhere. But the above APIs are really thin wrappers around vendor-specific services.

The interface is standardized, but the implementation, its dependencies, limitations, and privacy implications are not.

I already knew that using JavaScript dependencies from the npm ecosystem without using a bundler is painful. How do you get node_modules into the public? How do you deal with module dependencies? And how do you import files then?

Normal things like loading dependency code are surprisingly complicated in the "vanilla web".

Lea analyzed all the technical options to build for the web without a bundler, and the current state sucks.

Not using bundlers in any nontrivial application does seem like an exercise in masochism.

It's a good overview (and rant) on the current state of the web.