That’s a good point — the ESM build of Vue is solid, actively maintained, and does give you a no-build setup with the full feature set.

dagger.js aims a bit differently: it’s even smaller in scope (no virtual DOM, no reactivity system, no SFCs), and is designed to pair directly with Web Components and plain HTML snippets. The trade-off is fewer features, but also less surface area and almost zero “lock-in” — you can literally view-source and drop it into a page.

So I see them as different tiers on the same spectrum: Vue (ESM) if you want a mature, batteries-included framework without a bundler; Dagger.js if you just want minimal runtime directives and WC interop with almost no moving parts.

Appreciate you sharing the blog link — I’ll check it out. Always happy to see more people pushing the “modern JS without a toolchain” approach.

> The trade-off is fewer features, but also less surface area and almost zero “lock-in” — you can literally view-source and drop it into a page.

You should be able to drop in code dynamically on any existing website with JS Modules, I show an example of this in one of our release notes to showcase the versatility of JS modules [1], which:

   - Dynamically adds an Import Map with references to Vue, an external lib + Vue component library
   - Dynamically creates and mounts a new Vue Component on the fly
   - Drops in a fully functional and editable Data Grid with API bound forms, API + form validation, etc

I did try building web components with Lit [2], unfortunately WC's encapsulation and shadow dom made it difficult to enable theming and maintain shared global tailwind styles, so ditched it and went back to Vue. Although it's a good option for creating encapsulated components that don't need to share styles.

[1] https://docs.servicestack.net/releases/v6_06#js-modules-quic...

[2] https://lit.dev