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Discussion on: Going Buildless

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julien_chazal profile image
Julien Chazal

Thanks, going buildless is very interesting, but how do you uglify/minify your assets (JS, CSS, even images...) without a build step ?

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thepassle profile image
Pascal Schilp

For a long time, having a build step has been the de facto standard for frontend projects, and have added significant complexity and configuration to projects, and it's been hard to build anything without a build step.

As from this blog by Fred Schott A Future Without Webpack: "In 2019, you should use a bundler because you want to, not because you need to.", and today, we can.

This blogpost shows that we now have the standards (es modules, import maps) to do so; we can go buildless, and you can add a buildstep if you need to improve performance, but we dont require a buildstep. And many apps may not even need it, for example pika.dev, or this reddit app I showcase, or perflink by Luke Jackson.

There are also platforms that host your applications that can do minification for you, like Netlify. Netlify has options to minify your assets for you