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Comment by rorylaitila | Hacker News Reader

I've skipped the whole 'modern' web stack. I've stayed SSR first, hrefs/forms/url as only routing primitives, progressive enhancement, vanillajs-islands only where absolutely necessary. Its great. Apps never randomly break. No build hell. UX easy to debug (just look at the HTML). No random performance degradations. No client has ever said it feels dated. Just finished my first app-like PWA, also SSR. Getting great compliments on the UI and slick interactions using just native browser transitions. The vanilla web stack gets better and better! Honestly don't know what people think they are gaining with a heavy frontend.

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Likewise, I never liked JS much, nor the frontend dev experience.

I started out with the Seaside framework, but I've done several variations on that theme in different languages along the way.

It goes something like this: A typed server side DOM with support for native callbacks, generates HTML and hooks up callbacks. Changes are submitted to the server similar to traditional HTML forms, but using JSON. Changes to the DOM generate JS that's returned from the submit.

One headache with this approach is that documents need to stick around or callbacks will fail, and you need to hit the same server to get the document.

It should be doable to put a serialized version of the DOM on the client and passing that to callbacks to be rebuilt on the server.

  > Honestly don't know what people think they are gaining with a heavy frontend.

True, but (I repeat myself here), it depends on what kind of website we are talking about. For instance, a data-heavy SPA that workers use the whole day (like a CRM) is at least perceptually faster and more user friendly compared to the same thing but with traditional whole page reloads.

There's plenty of middle ground here, you don't need fancy frameworks to do partial reloads.

I am open for suggestions, but anything wanting to give a desktop like experience is going to be complex. Like the user clicks a button, now widget a1 » a1.3 » a1.3.2 » a1.3.2.2 should be in an "open state", while widget b1 » b1.2 » b1.2.1 needs to be in "disabled state" and widget c3 » c4 » c5 shows a status message.

Sure, and the further you go in that direction, the more you're building a traditional desktop GUI experience, which was always a bad fit for the web.

So yes, if that's really what you want to do, React or similar is probably what you want.

If.

I used to do things like that with about 10 lines of jQuery.

But we as a species decided that jQuery bad :(

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