[xutopia]

For the life of me I don’t understand why people absolutely insist on using JavaScript to render HTML. Backend frameworks do HTmL just fine.

DOM manipulations can be simplified to just a few actions: remove, Add, change.

The other types of manipulations and interactive features can be sprinkles of JavaScript instead of hundreds of kilobytes of the stuff.

HTMX, Hotwire/Turbo, LiveView are just so much saner to me.

[yoz-y]

For me the debate never reaches the end because different kinds of developers build fundamentally different kinds of products.

If you are building a website, a forum, or a generally document based application with little to no interactivity (beyond say, “play media”) then absolutely make a server rendered html page and sprinkle it with a bit of JavaScript for accordions.

If what you are building is a complex editor (image, text), is highly interactive (with maps, and charts and whatever) and users will generally spend a lot of time navigating between almost same pages. Basically when there would be no expectation that this should work with JavaScript disabled… then just build a purely client rendered application in the framework of your choice.

To me the dispute comes when one bleeds to another. I also think that mixed modes are abominations unless you truly have actual performance gains (maybe if you have 1B+ customers), which I’d argue is true for almost no one.

[Zanfa]

> For the life of me I don’t understand why people absolutely insist on using JavaScript to render HTML. Backend frameworks do HTmL just fine.

There’s an entire universe of front-end developers who don’t even know JavaScript. React is the only thing they’ve ever touched and they’re completely helpless without it.

[jfengel]

You can't write React without Javascript. Even the most basic React demos require you to write JS, if only to increment a counter.

Perhaps they don't really "know" the entire monstrosity of Javascript, but that's a tall order. JS is such a big language, with so many redundant features, that most developers will use only a fraction of it.

[intrasight]

Morphing the web user agent into something akin to an X11 server made total sense to me when I started doing such in 2000. If we developers had demanded a true distributed windows system, then we would have been spared this bag of hurt.

I remember demoing the Andrew Window Manager to colleagues in 1989 and them feeling like they had glimpsed the future. Alas, that future never came.

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