Developing without third-party scripts in 2023

Projects near government bodies come with a particular kind of constraint list, and somewhere on it, reliably, is this: no third-party scripts. No CDN-loaded widgets, no component library. The first reaction is usually a quiet inventory of everything you were planning to reach for. The second, a bit later, is noticing that the platform has been quietly catching up while everyone was busy installing things.

The arrangement only works, though, if the designer is willing to be pragmatic, and I say this as the designer in this case. A bespoke select dropdown is a lovely thing to want. And expensive, under these rules.

In the meantime, the system dropdown is honestly bearable. It’s keyboard accessible, screen-reader friendly, and works on every device, which is a strong opening argument for something that costs nothing. And sometimes the better question is one step earlier: for six options, do we need a dropdown at all?

The tradeoff is real. Vanilla means the complex interactions you do need get built carefully, by hand, with the accessibility work done properly rather than inherited from a library’s test suite. That’s slower, and it puts a natural ceiling on how much cleverness the interface can afford while constrained by a budget. But the ceiling turns out to be clarifying. Every interactive element has to justify itself, and many of the ones that can’t were primarily decorative.

There’s a specific satisfaction in it, too. Shipping real interactivity with nothing but the platform, accessible, naturally, feels surprisingly less like deprivation and more like discovering what the standard library can do by now. I wouldn’t choose the constraint for every project, but when it’s the right choice, I do get a bit excited about the craft that comes with it.