I'm wanting to enhance a server-rendered template with a bit of JavaScript to fetch data from the server and update the DOM.

I like that Vue can be "dropped in" to any HTML page, like jQuery, without completely taking over the frontend development process, but it still weighs in at 30k. Also, the Vue docs are primarily oriented towards a pre-processing SPA workflow.

Are there any light-weight libraries like Vue, around 2k-5k, that enhance static HTML with declarative DOM manipulation reactive data binding?

Is there a "plain JS" approach to declarative DOM manipulation?

mhagemeister

There is also Preact which is a 3kb alternative to React with a similar API. https://github.com/developit/preact/

Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers.

brylie

Thanks for the suggestion. Really great work keeping the framework so tiny! :-)

Can Preact just be "dropped in" to an existing HTML template, like jQuery?

mhagemeister

yup, just add the script tag and you're good to go! It's frequently used along with https://github.com/developit/htm for a jsx-less template syntax. No build tools required :)