I agree that it's a hack and I can't say that I like it. Blame the W3C and browser vendors for providing incomplete/barely functional standards like <dialog>.
Absolutely, and a ton of commenters (mostly on Reddit) seem to be missing that point. Use the right tool for the job. In the article I explicitly state that I couldn't have built the drag-and-drop invoice editor without JavaScript (although I wish that I could!).
Thank you! I had no idea that iOS required the pattern="\d" attribute. Those inputs require a decimal, so that pattern won't actually work (something like pattern="\d\.?\d*"). If I can get my hands on an iPhone to test that, I will deploy it shortly!
A lot of things are performed on the server, and then the server responds with a "flash" which is basically a little bar that says "Data saved." or "There was an error: ...".
There are a few places where I used a simple 5-liner to validate a field or something.
Unfortunately there was one place where I needed some heavier JS (for which I used Mithril.js), but it was absolutely required for when you're editing an invoice. You wouldn't want to edit line items and wait for a server response every time you make one change, so I simply determined that this was an area where I had no choice. Mithril simply modifies the DOM inside the <form> element, and then saving is a plain old POST request when you submit the form after you've made all of your changes.
The unfortunate reality is that I couldn't completely free myself from JavaScript, but got a lot closer.
Absolutely DO NOT use Flippa or BuySellEmpire. I made the terrible mistake of trying to use them. My experience was so bad I ended up saying "screw it" and never sold my product.
Cox is the worst. The prices magically increase every few months and it always takes a phone call to get them back down to what you originally thought they were.