Simon Willison’s Weblog

30th July 2024

What we got wrong about HTTP imports (via) HTTP imports are one of the most interesting design features of Deno:

import { assertEquals } from "https://deno.land/std@0.224.0/assert/mod.ts";

Six years after their introduction, Ryan Dahl reviews their disadvantages:

1. Lengthy (non-memorable) URLs littering the codebase
2. A slightly cumbersome import { concat } from "../../deps.ts"; pattern for managing dependencies in one place
3. Large projects can end up using multiple slightly different versions of the same dependencies
4. If a website becomes unavailable, new builds will fail (existing builds will continue to use their cached version)

Deno 2 - due in September - will continue to support them, but will lean much more on the combination of import maps (design borrowed from modern browsers) and the Deno project's JSR npm competitor. An import map like this:

{
  "imports": {
    "@std/assert": "jsr:@std/assert@1"
  }
}

Will then enable import statements that look like this:

import { assertEquals } from "@std/assert";