Rich Harris is a Javascript wizard who has already created the build tool Rollup and the framework Ractive. So therefore when he announced a new framework called Svelte I definitely wanted to take a look and see what problems he is trying to tackle with it.

Having spent some trivial time with some examples I have some understanding of what’s going on and how Svelte compares to other frameworks and approaches to building dynamic web pages.

One of the big things is that Svelte is based around a compiler that creates the deployed package which is just a variation on a Javascript file. So far I’ve found the compiler to be straight-forward and errors easy to understand. The compilation phase put Svelte closer to the Elm camp of pushing problems earlier in the development phase.

Svelte also offers a take on the Web Component, a Svelte component is responsible for managing its own dependencies and CSS. The definition of a Svelte component feels a little different to most component systems though. The basics of a templated piece of HTML is pretty standard but the component lives inside a HTML file that also uses the script and style tags to define the behaviour and appearance of the component respectively.

Using standard tags for this is, perhaps unsurprisingly, much more intuitive than defining React or Riot components.