Ask HN: How do we include JavaScript scripts in a browser these days?

2 points

2 years ago

I see all over the Web docs that show you can import scripts like this:

  import { readContract } from '@wagmi/core'
  import { USDTAbi } from '../abi/USDTAbi'

For example you see it here: https://docs.walletconnect.com/web3modal/javascript/about

But it's not clear at all to me how to actually set up the files and have them be updated.

It seems like this is for npm or yarn to pull from a remote repository maintained by @wagmi for instance. But then what? Do I just symlink to the node_modules directory somehow? Use browserify? Or these days I'd use webpack or whatever the cool kids are using these days?

I totally get how node package management works ... for NODE. But all these client-side JS projects these days have docs that are clearly for the client-side but the ES2015 module examples they show seem to leave out all instructions for how to actually get the files there, as if it's obvious.

What gives? And finally, what exactly does "browserify" do these days, since I think Node supports both ES modules and and CJS modules? I also see sometimes UMD universal modules

In short, I'm a bit confused how to use package management properly with browsers in 2024: https://modern-web.dev/guides/going-buildless/es-modules/

And finally, if you answer this, can you spare a word about typescript? Do we still need to use Babel and Webpack together to transpile it to JS, and minify and tree-shake, or what?

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