The JUSTHTML Manifesto

The web was already good

In 1995, you could build a webpage. In 2005, you could build a web app. In 2025, you apparently need a degree in build tooling to deploy a button. Somewhere along the way, the web got very complicated for reasons that mostly benefit tool vendors and conference speakers.

The browser got more powerful every year. HTML learned forms, video, canvas, web components, CSS animations. JavaScript grew fetch, modules, async/await. The platform kept delivering. The ecosystem responded by adding layers on top of layers, because that's what ecosystems do.

npm install is not a personality

The framework-first culture convinced a generation of developers that the web platform itself is insufficient — that you need React, that you need a bundler, that you need 847 transitive dependencies to show a list of items on a page. That's not engineering. That's cargo-culting with extra steps.

We're not against frameworks. We're against making them the default assumption. There's a reason experienced engineers sometimes joke that the best framework is "no framework" — they've been on enough projects to know what the accidental complexity costs.

AI writes the code. You decide the stack.

The vibe coder era is here. AI tools like Claude Code, Copilot, and Cursor can write a functioning web app from a description. That's genuinely remarkable. But if you don't specify the stack, you'll get the most common stack — which is React, packaged with Vite, deployed to Vercel, with a side of TypeScript you didn't ask for.

Here's the thing: AI follows instructions. If you tell Claude Code "build this with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript served by a Python backend," it will. The stack choice is yours. You're not locked into the defaults. The AI doesn't care — it just builds what you ask.

What we're asking you to do

Build one thing without a framework. Pick any project — a tool, a portfolio, a game, a blog. Serve it with whatever backend you're comfortable with. Write the HTML. Write the CSS. Write the JavaScript. Use the browser's built-in APIs. Let an AI help you if you want — just point it in the right direction.

You'll probably find it's more capable than you expected. You'll definitely find it's simpler to debug. You might find it's kind of fun.

Show us

When you're done, submit it to the showcase. We'll prove that vanilla HTML is enough — one project at a time.