It's a joke, or rather, a witty way to make a point. "vanilla X" refers to "X in the most basic fashion" or "X without anything extra", so "Vanilla JS" is JavaScript as exposed by the browser. VanillaJS is native JavaScript. That includes the DOM, various newfangled APIs, the core language features. It excludes third party code, i.e. what one would normally call libraries or frameworks. The people behind it probably want to point out the advantages of doing things this way by framing it like marketing for a third party framework. There is, or at least used to be, a trend in the JavaScript world to throw frameworks at every problem regardless how trivial a solution in "vanilla" JavaScript would be.