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Kraken goes vanilla JS

Over the last two weeks, I converted all of the interactive Kraken add-ons from jQuery to vanilla JavaScript.

So what’s that mean for you? A few things:

  1. Your sites will be faster. Vanilla JS is a lot faster than using a framework.
  2. If you still want or need to use a framework, you can pick any one you want. The add-ons will work with any of them.
  3. The add-ons will only work with modern, HTML5-standards browsers (that means IE 9 and higher). Don't worry - if you need more backwards compatibility, you can still get the old jQuery versions of all the add-ons.

Get the scripts

The add-ons were designed to integrate with Kraken, my mobile-first boilerplate, but they work great as standalone scripts, too.

  • Astro, a collection of mobile-first navigation patterns.
  • Drop, mobile-friendly dropdown menus.
  • Houdini, a simple expand-and-collapse widget.
  • Tabby, lightweight, mobile-first toggle tabs.
  • Modals, simple modal dialogue windows.
  • Slider, a responsive, touch-enabled content slider.
  • SmoothScroll.js, simple jQuery script to animate scrolling to anchor links.

To learn more about how I made the transition, read Ditching jQuery for Vanilla JS.