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Comment by jscholes | Hacker News Reader

This page talks a lot about knowledge that is transferable, e.g.:

> We want your experience with Remix to transfer to web development generally.

But then, you opened the quickstart tutorial[1], and the first bit of mark-up is:

    <Link to="/posts">Posts</Link>

Uh... okay. Not only is this not how you create links in HTML, but it also repurposes an element that actually does exist in HTML[2] for a completely different purpose. Of course, as to not conflict with that element, I now have to remember to type the L in uppercase, which is another aspect that doesn't carry over to HTML either.

It seems the amount they're willing to reinvent is limited to JavaScript.

[1] https://remix.run/docs/en/v1/tutorials/blog [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/li...

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That's only if you want to take advantage of the hydration and client side routing.

You can of course use regular <a> links and navigate to a new page every time.

> That's only if you want to take advantage of the hydration and client side routing.

I feel it would be doable for a framework to determine which links should be client-side routed versus not. Or, failing that (or in conjunction with it), provide a way for developers to indicate that information, without reinventing a cornerstone of the web and HTML mark-up from scratch.

I agree with your point.

I dont know what it is about some devs aversion for HTML.

But a anchor with a data attribute should more than suffice rather than creating over-engineered abstractions.

But then again, not many devs even read the HTML docs.

That's probably what they would have done if starting from scratch, but Remix is built on top of React Router which is a 7-8 year old project with its own idioms.

Also, Remix is for React developers. It's expected you will use JSX, components, etc.

Personally I have a toy client-side router for Svelte. Links that need to trigger client-side navigation simply use a Svelte action:

https://github.com/PierBover/roots-svelte-router

> I feel it would be doable for a framework to determine which links should be client-side routed versus not

I think that is worse. Replacing a core html element behind the scenes to do a `history.pushState` is like to monkey patching. This way you can still use <a> elements and everything will work just fine, or you can very deliberately use a <Link> element if you want the extra functionality it provides.

Same as with the <form> element which will work just fine in Remix as if it was a 2005 PHP project. Or you can use Remix‘s <Form> component which does all the "AJAX" magic behind the scenes that you'll spend two weeks adding to your 2005 PHP project.

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