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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

> Unlike many frameworks, Astro uses standard HTML <a> elements to navigate between pages (also called routes), with traditional page refreshes.

I love it. Truly amazing that this is the exception these days.

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There seems to be parity with SvelteKit (nee Sapper), Remix, Next.js, and Solid Start in this. The <Link> is only in the source code, and as the Astro post said, only for some such as SvelteKit and not for others such as Next.js. The generated code still has <a> links that work without the client-side router. Next.js was a bit overly SPA up until recently, but now it has progressive enhancement with forms. https://nextjs.org/docs/app/building-your-application/data-f...

Is it possible that that’s the joke? Unless this is unique to Vue, I’d expect that you can use an <a> tag in any framework if you want to trigger a “traditional page refresh” instead of leveraging the router to do it efficiently.

Yes but you still use <a> tag for view transitions native to the browser. That’s the beauty.

That’s great, but I’ve been able to do that with CSS for years.

That’s amazing, but others haven’t so it’s nice when a framework makes things more accessible for the rest of us!

What’s not accessible about CSS? This is already a low bar to pass. I remember adding CSS3 transitions a decade ago at my first internship.

It feels like there is a lot of brigading and shilling of Astro throughout this thread, as typical with web frontend frameworks.

It’s just the time savings, any competent engineer can implement better transitions, it’s just not very high priority these days. A simple one liner built-in is very convenient.

> A simple one liner built-in is very convenient.

Then why do you need bloated web UI that's not performant as React, Vue, Angular, Svelte? You can also just add 1 line of css classes to HTML elements to have transitions if you use a library like Animate.css.

Isn't that just how the view transitions API works?

Yes but this in contrast specifically to <Link to=

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