You may have noticed, reading the Gutenberg documentation, that there are two ways to add new blocks. There’s ES5 and ESNext. The two code bases are similar, but they certainly can confuse new developers. And while it’s possible to migrate from one to the other, that too can be a bit of a headache.
Consistently naming versions? HAH!
Providing a consistent naming pattern is important for people to be able to understand what version of a software they’re using, and what’s next. Whatever you pick, when you decide how to go. you’re pretty much stuck with it forever. There are exceptions, but even Apple and Microsoft had semi-logical explanations for their names. I can’t really justify Windows ME to anyone, though.
In Open Source land, people love to complain that WordPress itself doesn’t use semantic versioning (aka SemVer). That is, a jump from 4.2 to 4.3 is a major release, where as if it were SemVer, that would be a minor change.
SemVer uses the concept of MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH with regards to numbers, which means you increment:
- MAJOR – when you make incompatible API changes,
- MINOR – when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner
- PATCH – when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes
WordPress does MAJOR.MAJOR.MINOR-OR-PATCH which really confuses a lot of people, and I understand that.
Of course, then you look at the history of JavaScript and you cry a little.
JavaScript isn’t Java, and neither are coffee.
We have to go back a while here. In 1995, Netscape Navigator was releasing a new coding language called LiveScript. In 1996 they renamed it to JavaScript, presumably to capitalize on the whole ‘Java’ craze. I actually took some Java classes back in those days. Anyway, Netscape tossed the deal over to ECMA International for some standardization, and got us ECMAScript.
ECMAScript is the language, Javascript is the most popular implementation of the language. Its like HTML and XHTML, and when you get down to brass tacks, most people don’t care. They use the terms interchangeably. And that’s okay.
From 1996 to around 2010, nothing changed. Javascript trucked along doing what it did, and ECMAScript didn’t change much at all. There was ECMAScript2 and ECMAScript3, but after that, we had a decade of nothing. The astute reader now has gone “ECMAScript… ECMA Script. ES?” And they would be correct.
What is ESNext?
ECMAScript 5 (aka ES5) came out in 2009, but really it didn’t get picked up until 2012. This is because of our old nemesis, Internet Explorer. In the last 6 years, developers have pretty much stuck to ES5, since it works in all modern browsers. We have ES6, also known as ES2015, but not every browser supports it yet. Which is why we have ESNext.
To put it simply, ESNext (or ES.Next) is the future version of ECMAScript which is yet to be released. If you hear ES7 or ES2016, that’s actually the same thing. The naming system is a little janky and confusing, if you hadn’t already noticed.
And this is why you’ll hear it called ESNext in WordPress. It encompasses ES6/ES2015, ES7/ES2016, and whatever comes next. Aaaaaah you see?
ES4 was abandoned by the way.
It’s Not Dangerous.
While not all browsers support ESNext, there’s good news for WordPress. It doesn’t matter because we transpile (I’ll get there in a second). For WordPress and Gutenberg, the primary difference is going to be in the ‘style’ of code and the build process. The break down is as follows:
- ES5 is more obscure to write, but runs immediately
- ESNext is more clean to write, but requires post compilation (transpilation) to run Gutenberg
That probably didn’t help. Okay, how about this. There a way to write CSS (called SASS) which lets you add programatic features to your CSS. ES5 and ESNext are the same way. You totally can write ESNext without compiling, but not yet for Gutenberg. This is kind of the same thing, except when we transpile ESNext, we’re converting it to ES5.
Now, we use ES5 in the end for a couple reasons, but primarily it’s because Gutenberg uses React, and React JSX (which translates Javascript to XHTML). That requires us to transpile back to ES5 in order to be used by all browsers. For now.
Browsers update a lot faster than they did when we were trying to get rid of IE5. Still, Internet Explorer is around and will be for a while at financial institutions, so don’t get super excited yet.
Where does this leave us?
When you go to write your first Gutenblocks, I recommend ES5 for the simple ones and ESNext for the complex ones. ESNext is more semantic, in that it’s laid out in a more human readable way. ES5 is faster to edit and test.