Rediscovering web development?

Anmol Saini - 18 Jul 2022

I was going through Fresh, the new web framework of the Deno ecosystem. Some highlights are

Selective hydration
Server-side rendering with no-js shipped by default

It reminded me of the early days of web development with PHP. When everything was actually rendered server-side, javascript was the second-class citizen and jQuery was the only hero in town. Slowly we started putting every logic in js. With SPA (Single Page Application) and node, the backend-frontend started looking the same. Entry to Full-stack development was easy and it accelerated web development.

The vanilla js was not easy to maintain, so the next wave was to invent opinionated frameworks on how to treat js as MVC. All these fast changes in the ecosystem made the situation worse for some, download a few mb's of js before a page can print Hello World. Never made sense to me.

With SSR + no-js as the new cool thing (which is basically just plain HTML), we are again at the beginning of the 2000s—embracing HTML as the true web messenger.