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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why people want so bad to mix in code into HTML.

The whole fight since 2000 was to avoid doing that through minimalistic templating and naming elements semantically so you can attach the logic from outside.

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That approach (i.e. the jquery style of attach logic to the DOM) just doesn't scale when you're writing a single page app where _everything_ needs to have JS logic attached to it. It turns into a complete mess of imperative UI twiddling and it's extremely easy to forget to update some little element in response to a change.

The bigger question IMHO is if you actually need a SPA. If you don't then yeah the old jquery style (now alpine.js or similar frameworks are spiritual successors) is perfectly fine.

Scaling comes from splitting your app into components and correctly mamaging staye not from the way you attach things to your view layer.

jQuery didn't scale because there was no recommend way to split it into components and managing state.

Those day Backbone.js was amazing innovation.

If jQuery came into existance today when we know what we know about components and their role in building large applications it would be perfectly suitable for many applications.

I think this is losing some to text and experience with what was available at that time.

Attaching to the don wasn’t mandatory and was completely manageable.

If anything building a web app has become much heavier and longer to develop than it ever has.

I agree with this, we managed to sometimes create SPAs faster even though we had to duplicate template/initial page logic on the server side for each page in case of direct link/page refresh. Nowadays sometimes figuring out which prop you misused from a 3rd party component based on a 100 lines TS error takes more time than the actual coding.

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