I’ve been collaborating with Boris, the author of JsViews, and we do have plans to modernize the website—which speaks directly to your point about first impressions and adoption. You’re absolutely right that presentation matters; if something looks dated, people may disengage before digging any deeper.

I also raised the jQuery dependency concern with Boris for exactly the reason you mentioned: many teams automatically rule out anything that requires jQuery, especially outside of legacy codebases. That’s a real barrier today.

For what it’s worth, a jQuery-free version may happen. Boris is actively exploring it, but he’s making no promises—it’s a non-trivial problem and would effectively require a full rewrite rather than a simple refactor.

Congrats to everyone involved in the jQuery 4.0 release.

For what it’s worth, if you’re looking for a more structured approach on top of jQuery, JsViews (https://jsviews.com) provides a reactive templating and data-binding system that’s been around and stable for many years.

It hasn’t seen the same level of adoption as newer frameworks, but it may still be of interest to people who prefer the jQuery ecosystem.

I too was stabbed in grade school; twice actually, in the same hand. I think both times for pestering girls as they were writing, lol. I guess I deserved it.

Both left visible gray marks under the healed skin...one on a finger and the other in the soft tissue between my thumb and index finger. Years later, in my 30s, I was handling some super strong magnets and felt tugging on the tissue next to my thumb, indeed that magnet was pulling strongly on that piece of embedded graphite. I thought that was strange because either the graphite had impurities of iron in it or my body had accumulated iron around it.

Some years later I would develop random knuckle pain in a couple of the nearby fingers. I was skeptical that this foreign object was to blame...but I convinced a doctor to do some minor in-office surgery to remove it. The doctor made an incision and using forceps tried to find and pull it out. He couldn't find it (which he initially warned me about and suggested ultrasound guidance) and asked me to get out my magnet and pull the object up...his forceps immediately snapped to the magnet, I didn't flinch but was laughing internally. He grabbed the object, which was probably half the size of a sesame seed...much smaller than what he was expecting based on the amount of tissue that was being pulled up by the magnet.

Months would pass and I no longer had pain in those knuckles, that was probably 5 years ago. The other stab mark, which is on a different finger, never caused any issues.

The nurse afterwards said, "I cannot believe you did that." I chuckled.

I can now say that I've assisted in my own surgery ;-)

I use something that many people don't know about or aren't talking/posting about: JsRender/JsViews. https://www.jsviews.com

JsRender can be used client-side and server-side using Nodejs for rendering templates. JsViews adds observability (one-way or two-way) to JsRender on the frontend and requires jQuery (I like jQuery, it's overhead is minor ;-).

JsViews is intuitive, modular and extremely flexible and self-documenting in my opinion. JsViews does not include a router as there are so many different ways of doing routing and depends on your needs. The concept and syntax of converters is really cool too.