[spjwebster]

Makes me smile too. Around 2008 while I was at Yahoo! I built a standalone library called Dhaka (literally stuck a pin in a map and used the place name as the project name) that did almost exactly this. It was used on a few of the EU sites but I left before I got chance to open source it. The problem I was trying to solve was eliminating a bunch of duplicate JavaScript that was essentially sending/fetching data to/from a remote source and inserting/replacing it into the current page.

[zerocrates]

Or in a similar vein I remember Github making a mediumly big deal years and years ago about having no-reload moving between pages of the directory tree within a repo with... I think their library was called pjax? And it fetched some partial HTML from the server and updated a container, plus having some pushState/popState to make it work with browser history.

The most interesting part of it to me is that the mainstream has gotten so far out over to react and data payloads that the paradigm of "send some HTML and stick it in a container" is seen as revolutionary. Not to say that a well-designed library for doing this is a bad idea, just that... it's interesting to see how it's talked about.

[danielscrubs]

I made some sites with Pjax. It was crazy fast and didn’t have the issues that React had. Back button works 100% of the time, users always had a working link to share and so on. When I saw this I immediately had to search the comments for Pjax because the idea was quite similar. I think the main problem was that heavy backends started to go out of style, especially C# ones that had good Pjax support.

[yawaramin]

As someone born and (mostly) raised in Dhaka, that's pretty funny to me.