Just imagine, no more gulp, webpack, rollup, parcel, snowpack, vite... You just fire up your editor and everything is ready in a modern browser.<p>What does this look like?
What is missing for this to be a reality?
When 2025 rolls around, I can see the following:<p>1. Foremost, HTML Modules allow importing HTML files natively, that's key. New components are more stable, more accessible, and widely supported. Web Components are more stable than ever.<p>2. The most popular features of Sass/Scss are added into core CSS by this point<p>3. With broad support of features like :has, @scope, @property, subgrid, anchor positioning, MPA view transitions, and lots more<p>4. Modern JS is stable, most new versions are incremental in the 2020s.
It’s already a reality, I was doing it about ten years ago.<p>require.js was a big piece of the puzzle, allowing the use of modules in browser without a build step.<p>The only time a “build” happened was to concat/minify scripts for production release, but even this wasn’t strictly necessary.<p>There were other pieces involved, but we had a powerful stack (aforementioned modules, css preprocessing, reactive templating) that had a faster and easier workflow than anything happening today.
I mean, you can do this today right now. The "problem" is that many people rely on frameworks. Frameworks have dependencies, so you need something to manage them. Then you need a way to make sure that you have no namespace collisions.<p>You probably want to optimize your your build to not include code from libraries that you aren't using.<p>Boom, you've recreated modern build tools.
I think the reason is because employers are putting in various requirements for a job. 'Must be proficient with React' or 'Must have experience with $FrameworkOfTheDay' is a common occurrence. Really, all you need experience with is HTML+CSS+JS/jQuery and maybe PHP for back-end stuff. You can build anything with that stack.