[post-it]

> you would eliminate all usage of innerHTML

The mythical refactor where all deprecated code is replaced with modern code. I'm not sure it has ever happened.

I don't have an alternative of course, adding new methods while keeping the old ones is the only way to edit an append-only standard like the web.

[thenewnewguy]

If you want to adopt this in your project, you can add a linter that explicitly bans innerHTML (and then go fix the issues it finds). Obviously Mozilla cannot magically fix the code of every website on the web but the tools exist for _your_ website.

[Vinnl]

I kinda like the way JS evolved into a modern language, where essentially ~everyone uses a linter that e.g. prevents the use of `var`. Sure, it's technically still in the language, but it's almost never used anymore.

(Assuming transpilers have stopped outputting it, which I'm not confident about.)

[thunderfork]

Depending on the transpiler and mode of operation, `var` is sometimes emitted.

For example, esbuild will emit var when targeting ESM, for performance and minification reasons. Because ESM has its own inherent scope barrier, this is fine, but it won't apply the same optimizations when targeting (e.g.) IIFE, because it's not fine in that context.

https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1301

[yawaramin]

Actually... https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/52924

[Vinnl]

Ah yeah, I remember that. General point still stands: in terms of the lived experience of developers, `var` is essentially deprecated.

[plorkyeran]

I touch JS that uses var heavily on a daily basis and I would be incredibly surprised to find out that I am alone in that.

[Vinnl]

That is indeed why I added qualifiers to "everyone" and "never".

[delaminator]

for some values of "everyone" and "never".

[bulbar]

It for sure happens for drop in replacements.

[littlestymaar]

Nobody's talking about old code here.

Having an alternative to innerHTML means you can ban it from new code through linting.

[noduerme]

Finally, a good use case for AI.

[Aachen]

Yeah, using a kilowatt GPU for string replacement is going to be the killer feature. I probably shouldn't even be joking, people are using it like this already

[littlestymaar]

This ship has sailed unfortunately, no later than yesterday I've seen coworkers redact a screenshot using chatGTP.

[charcircuit]

When the condition for when you want to replace is hard to properly specify, AI shines for such find and replaces.

[Aachen]

This one is literally matching "innerHTML = X" and setting "setHTML(X)" instead. Not some complex data format transformation

But I can see what you mean, even if then it would still be better for it to print the code that does what you want (uses a few Wh) than doing the actual transformation itself (prone to mistakes, injection attacks, and uses however many tokens your input data is)

[charcircuit]

That can break the site if you do the find and replace blindly. The goal here is to do the refactor without breaking the site.

[lelanthran]

> When the condition for when you want to replace is hard to properly specify, AI shines for such find and replaces.

And, in your opinion, this is one of those cases?

[charcircuit]

It is because the new API purposefully blocks things the old API did not.

[josefx]

Wouldn't AI be trained on data using innerHTML?

[Aachen]

My experience is that they somehow print quite modern code despite things like ES6 being too new to be standard knowledge even for me and I'm not even middle-aged yet

Maybe the last 10 years saw so much more modern code than the last cumulative 40+ years of coding and so modern code is statistically more likely to be output? Or maybe they assign higher weights to more recent commits/sources during training? Not sure but it seems to be good at picking this up. And you can always feed the info into its context window until then

[skeeter2020]

This is not my experience. Claude has been happily generating code over the past week that is full of implicit any and using code that's been deprecated for at least 2 years.

>> Maybe the last 10 years saw so much more modern code than the last cumulative 40+ years of coding and so modern code is statistically more likely to be output?

The rate of change has made defining "modern" even more difficult and the timeframe brief, plus all that new code is based on old code, so it's more like a leaning tower than some sort of solid foundation.

[SahAssar]

ES6 is 11 years old. It's not that new.

[Aachen]

Hence the example of how long it takes non-LLMs to pick that up, whereas LLMs seem to get it despite there being loads of old code out there

See also my reply to the sibling comment with the same remark https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47151211

My mistake for saying 10 instead of 11 years btw, but I don't think it changes the point

[chrisweekly]

> "ES6 being too new to be standard knowledge"

Huh? It's been a decade.

[Aachen]

Exactly, I learned coding JS before 2015 (it was my first language, picked up during what is probably called middle school in english). I haven't had to learn it again from scratch, so I need to go out of my way to find if there is maybe a better way to do the thing I can already do fine. It's not automatic knowledge, yet the LLM seems to have no trouble with it, so I'm pointing out that they seem to not have problems upgrading. The grandparent comment suggested it would need to be trained anew to use this new method instead. Given how much old (non-ES6) JS there is, apparently it gets it quite easily so any update that includes some amount of this new code will probably do it just fine

[charcircuit]

Which is why it can easily understand how innerHTML is being used so that it can replace it with the right thing.

[stvltvs]

Honest question: Is there a way to get an LLM to stop emitting deprecated code?

[fragmede]

Theoretically, if you could train your own, and remove all references to the deprecated code in the training data, it wouldn't be able to emit deprecated code. Realistically that ability is out of reach at the hobbiest level so it will have to remain theoretical for at least a few more iterations of Moore's law.