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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

Prediction: the big move in the next few years is going to be "back to hypermedia"

People are realizing that you can accomplish quite a bit more with hypermedia than you could in the past, and that the complexity of javascript stacks isn't worth it in many cases.

Older, mature hypermedia-based technologies like rails, django, and even PHP, will experience a resurgence and a lot of older lessons and techniques in web development (caching, SQL tuning, etc.) will be rediscovered.

I have a dog in this fight, w/ htmx, but I think we are increasingly seeing evidence for this move.

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We might see a combination of both.

The biggest CMS of one of the biggest languages is moving away from the approach you call hypermedia by implementing a JS-based editor and REST apis. Effectively they are building a headless version on top of their legacy platform, which can be used like a JavaScript stack.

This can be used as an argument for the hypermedia approach: "Let's just use this thing for now, we can always implement our SPA inside it later, if we need to."

> The biggest CMS of one of the biggest languages

Which CMS is this?

WordPress

I think that's a trailing indicator, a reaction by Wordpress to the current "right way" to build web software.

I don't think this transition has been very well received by the WordPress community...

>Older, mature hypermedia-based technologies like rails, django, and even PHP

Not sure what you refer to as hypermedia.

In the first part of your comment I assumed something like a new version of Flash. Here you seem to simply imply http/hypertext.

But then again, those technologies where never lost (to need to be rediscovered). They're as popular as ever, people just add more stuff on top, at the client JS layer.

Anywhere you see graphql, you see someone who's rejected hypermedia.

Not sure I follow. GraphQL is a way to ask for data from the backend. What does it have to do with the client layer?

It's generally used as a replacement for REST, which, if done properly, uses hypermedia.

If we see a return to "hypermedia" it won't be wholesale, but rather in the form of a static site generator that does the 80% work and is easy to extend the rest of the way. Something somewhere between Svelte and Gatsby. The react component model and JSX style bracketed DSLs both have a lot of traction, the main issue is the amount of groundwork and glue needed to do simple things with them.

i don't agree at all

i think it will rather be in non-javascript technologies with strong existing hypermedia infrastructure again, like rails, django, etc

the front-end component model is anti-RESTful and is really a mechanism for handling the complexity of the current client-server approach, it becomes significantly less important as hypermedia is re-embraced

I think RESTful APIs will die before component based interfaces do. Component based UI has been a thing for like 30 years outside the web dev space, and GraphQL/post-based RPC APIs solve a lot of problems and can be derived cleanly from a database schema or functional modules.

Hypermedia also doesn't play well with offline-capable applications, which limits its use cases.

the component problem, in as much as it is one that can't be dealt with via just standard template includes, can be solved server side and offline-capable isn't a huge percentage of web apps

we just disagree, the future will tell us who's right

I think you’re both wrong and the future belongs to platforms that compile to web assembly.

could be!

Hypermedia is just the addition of graphics, sound, etc... to your web page. I don't understand the context you're using it in here.

It already happened with SSR

I think requirements have generally shifted quite bit from what plain html can do, if that's what you mean with "hypermedia". Though true, there's probably a growing understanding that one doesn't need React on every website. So maybe it'll rather be more refined understanding of when to use certain technologies.

https://htmx.org/examples/

Certainly interesting but I fail to understand what's the big benefit? Also I would be afraid to have some corner cases that would need to be covered with JS, and that could get really ugly.

the big benefits are the simplicity of the model and returning to the hypermedia network architecture (with its attendant benefits)

don't worry! If you need to kick out to some front end scripting we have a solution for that as well:

https://hyperscript.org

So no ugly javascript! ;)

Exactly. This "stuff" is maturing, and a lot of people realize we've been headed the wrong direction for a long time.

At some point, stuff needs to be maintained. You can still start and drive that 1967 car, after all.

The react team are developing "server components" that will bring the js ecosystem even closer to your prediction.

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