Then again these days maybe that is enough for some people. I know a lot of people are eschewing server side page generation entirely for some static js and ass

Then again these days maybe that is enough for some people. I know a lot of people are eschewing server side page generation entirely for some static js and assets sitting in an S3 bucket that talks to an API server. The only barrier now is SEO, and people are coming up with all sorts of creative solutions to deal with that, as the search engine bots themselves get better and better at indexing js content. That said, I sort of hate frontend js frameworks. You can do everything I just said without them, and really, we should have been doing it for years, like even pre-2010, but we were just too caught up in this markup = server side mentality to really operate that way. Part of it, I think, was that CDNs are a sort of recent thing, and before them you were always running a server anyway, so why not generate the page server side if you're going to go to that much trouble. Also client-side capabilities have dramatically increased, and then you have HTML 5 to consider.