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Maybe it's because I'm from GenX and from that era but I still don't get why JS frameworks jump through all these hoops just to avoid server-side programming. W

• solardev 4y ago
  In large part because HTML was not designed as a "streamable" format. The main benefit of AJAX is that it lets you send information back and forth without needing a whole page refresh. You don't have to load anything to send a request to the server. But when the server sends a response back, HTML by itself can't do anything with it. Interaction isn't really a part of the language. So Javascript needs to act as the client, and take the information to apply some sort of DOM transformation to the HTML so that the user can actually see the response and further interact with it. Javascript is what allows HTML to be interactive in real time at the component level. There's a lot more of that these days than in the past. The frameworks still do the same thing, at a higher level of abstraction and with better debugging and less verbosity and manual labor. They make it much quicker to create and maintain complex compositions of stateful components... if that is meaningless, your page probably doesn't need a framework, but a lot of complex sites today are exactly that (compositions of stateful components) It's possible that may change in the future, like with the Web Components spec. But for now, once Flash was deprecated, JS is the only tool really available to web devs for this sort of usage. It's not that it's the best choice for an interactive web, it's just what history left us with... flawed, slow, clunky, but popular enough as to be worth the costs.