Ask HN: Did we over-engineer the web, should we relearn jQuery?
Dropped React for a small project and used jQuery. Shipped faster, less mental overhead. Did we trade simplicity for ceremony, or is this just nostalgia? Curious what others think.
With AI agents, I do think these apps that manipulate the DOM so much that they obscure access to useful data will hinder AI agent discovery of their useful data. If an agent is looking at your website, it cannot see what you do not show it. This makes your site less visible to them and therefore reduces its likelihood of referencing it in its responses. Pure HTML sites are very kind to agents and allow them to generate better answers with attribution. Think of this as AI optimization for your website. Some regression to pure HTML will be the norm in the near future. Bottom line, build apps that run on machines, and use APIs to feed them, but build pages for the web with the intent of having AI agents discover them and have a good shot at using the data.
If it's not a page, it's an app and that has to be wasm, because you are not allowed to treat the DOM of the browser so badly and unnecessarily bad, that it chokes under the pressure to render 1 view.
Example: https://www.egui.rs/#demo