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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

by xutopia 9mo ago

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.

intrasight 9mo ago
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. https://mirrors.nycbug.org/pub/The_Unix_Archive/Unix_Usenet/comp.unix.wizards/1985-May/004962.html https://mirrors.nycbug.org/pub/The_Unix_Archive/Unix_Usenet/...
yoz-y 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
> 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 9mo ago
  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.

by xutopia 9mo ago

intrasight 9mo ago

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. https://mirrors.nycbug.org/pub/The_Unix_Archive/Unix_Usenet/comp.unix.wizards/1985-May/004962.html https://mirrors.nycbug.org/pub/The_Unix_Archive/Unix_Usenet/...

yoz-y 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

> 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 9mo ago
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.