> Also, there was a push to move the shitty code from the server to the client to free up server resources and prevent your servers from ruining the experience for everyone.
People forget how bad MPAs were, and how expensive/complicated they were to run.
Front end frameworks like svelte let you write nearly pure HTML and JS, and then the backend just supplies data.
Having the backend write HTML seems bonkers to me, instead of writing HTML on the client and debugging it, you get to write code that writes code that you then get to debug. Lovely!
Even more complex frameworks, like React, you have tools like JSX that map pretty directly to HTML, and in my experience a lot of the hard to debug problems come up with the framework tries to get smart and doesn't just stupidly pop out HTML.
We decided for fun to do a small project in htmx (we had to pick something, one person opted strongly). Yeah, I was cringing and still am. I fully support frontend/backend split status quo.
For stuff that is uncomplicated I much prefer svelte as it still keeps the wall between frontend/backend but let's you do a lot of "yolo frontend" that is shortlived and gets fixed. I run small startup on the side" svelte fe + clojure be. It works great as I have different acceptance for crap in frontend (if I can fix something with style="", I do and I don't care). I often hotfix a lot of stuff in front where I can and just deploy to return later and find better solution that involves some changes in backend.
I can't imagine that for moving a button I would have to do deployment dance for whole app that in my case has 3 components(where one is distributed and requires strict backwards compat).
People forget how bad MPAs were, and how expensive/complicated they were to run.
Front end frameworks like svelte let you write nearly pure HTML and JS, and then the backend just supplies data.
Having the backend write HTML seems bonkers to me, instead of writing HTML on the client and debugging it, you get to write code that writes code that you then get to debug. Lovely!
Even more complex frameworks, like React, you have tools like JSX that map pretty directly to HTML, and in my experience a lot of the hard to debug problems come up with the framework tries to get smart and doesn't just stupidly pop out HTML.