Ability to degrade gracefully in the absence of JS

Still something that is missing from most web projects out there. Not cool. This is not only about surveillance, ads, trackers etc. – sometimes people are legitimately out and about (say on an archaeologist site) and they should be able to opt out of JS and the Web should be able to [minimally] serve them.

I’d like to see more frameworks allow something along those lines. Some of the app’s artifacts and functionality could be described with something akin to Rails / Phoenix templating language that varies its outputs depending on if the user’s browser has enabled JS.

I don’t think it needs much, but an ORM is definitely on the must-have list.

Web frameworks are difficult to get right in my mind. You want them to be prescriptive, so you benefit from shared conventions when moving between projects, but flexible so you do not become restricted by the framework if your application moves in a direction counter to the framework itself. Ruby on Rails is a good example of a framework that has strong conventions, but can be a pain when you start to fight it.

I’ve been impressed with the care taken towards the Phoenix framework to keep things modular, as to avoid framework bloat, but also batteries (mostly) included for rapid iteration in the early stages of the project.