Comment by Spivak
11 hours ago
Yes? Users often prefer a nice GUI but CMSs are effectively what you describe and run the majority of content oriented sites. Static site generators are just the dev-centric version of that. The more common situation is that you're generating pages on the server and shipping a massive JS bundle just to display what could have been rendered once.
But even given your position you see no difference between shipping the user a binary and shipping source code plus a compiler in terms of the user's experience? Surely the existence of server side react points to the server doing the initial lift being an improvement.
> Yes? Users often prefer a nice GUI but CMSs are effectively what you describe and run the majority of content oriented sites.
I don't think you understood my question. I stressed the fact that complaining about the complexity of a page implemented with a JavaScript framework is a red herring, because said complexity doesn't go away by moving it to a server.
And the old "dynamic HTML" approach is not easier to maintain and developm. By far.
In the meantime, what goes away is performance and perceived performance. Your dynamic HTML pages need to travel all around the world until clients see an update, and a page reload is far heavier and time consuming than doing a fetch to get data.
Try to ask yourself this simple question: why do software engineers bother with JavaScript frameworks? Do you think everyone has absolutely no idea about what they are doing?