USWDS - Core: Remove unused dependencies

[aduth]

Summary

Removed many unused development dependencies.

Breaking change

This is not a breaking change.

Problem statement

USWDS should minimize its use of dependencies and eliminate unused dependencies in order to improve maintainability of remaining dependencies and to reduce attack surface area for supply chain attacks.

Solution

Removes unused dependencies after analysis.

Analysis:

• babel-loader
  • Added in USWDS - Library: Add storybook. #4295 but unclear that it was ever used
• gulp-changed
  • Added in USWDS-3216: Upgrade axe-core to 3.4.1. #3280, last reference removed in [Beta] Remove unused deps #4603
• gulp-clean
  • Added in Automated Releases #980. Initially removed in Update gulp to v4  #2957 as deprecated, dependency added back in commit of Component: Icons #3862 (a67a5a9), but usage removed prior to merge (8b4257b).
• gulp-cli
  • Redundant with gulp, which already provides CLI binary
• normalize.css
  • Added in Move vendor libs into npm dependency management system #999, last reference removed in USWDS - LIBRARY | Consolidate gulp tasks #4140
• path
  • path is a default Node module
• react-dom
  • Added in Update dependencies to resolve peer conflicts #4993 to resolve peer dependency warning, should be fixed as of upstream Core: Move react and react-dom to peer deps storybookjs/storybook#12972
• twig-html-loader
  • Referenced in a commit of Output HTML from .twig files with .json data dependencies #4363 (afec153), but usage removed prior to merge (cac79c3)

Testing and review

Verify build passes and Storybook local development is unaffected.

Dependency updates

Dependency name	Previous version	New version
babel-loader	[9.1.3]	--
gulp-changed	[4.0.3]	--
gulp-clean	[0.4.0]	--
gulp-cli	[2.3.0]	--
normalize.css	[8.0.1]	--
path	[0.12.7]	--
react-dom	[17.0.2]	--
twig-html-loader	[0.1.9]	--

[anselmbradford]

It looks like the mention of normalize.css here could be updated or removed. It's possible it could be updated to "uswds-elements/lib/normalize", but looking at https://github.com/uswds/uswds/blob/develop/packages/uswds-elements/lib/_normalize.scss, it doesn't look like anything is actually being overridden.

[aduth]

The appearance: none would still override the -webkit-appearance: textfield from the _normalize.scss stylesheet. I think the comment itself is meant to serve as an explanation for the disabled Stylelint rule, since Stylelint would normally expect a selector of [type="search"], which would have equal specificity to the normalized styles. I think as long as it came after the normalize styles, it would take priority, but maybe it was desired to want to avoid depending on stylesheet order?

[aduth]

But yes I would agree with your point that the comment could be updated to reference USWDS's internal normalization stylesheet rather than normalize.css, which is not used directly.

[mejiaj]

Thanks for submitting this!

I can confirm builds and local storybookJS are unaffected