Last week, I encountered bugs with the single-page front end, so, out of curiosity, I rewrote the front end using SvelteKit, which resolved most of these issues.

Unlike React, which puts HTML in JavaScript, Svelte keeps JavaScript inside HTML, like Vue and traditional web pages, and builds markup like a template language, such as Jinja. By using native HTML and CSS, Svelte automatically includes recent HTML and CSS features, useful for creating dialogs.

Naturally, I’ve been using SvelteKit for routing. Like React Router, there are clear separations between front-end and back-end code, but there are also options to write universal code. SvelteKit still performs some client-side navigation, but it seems to match native browser behavior better than React Router. It’s also nice making API calls in the back end, improving load times and accessibility.

Next week

I made an unsuccessful attempt to simplify the API this week, so the application is currently broken. Next week, I’ll successfully simplify the API, then recreate the site’s CSS.