by imiric | 2025-09-03 09:33:01+00:00
> If you listen to people actually building frameworks (Solid, Preact, Vue, Svelte), you'll learn that "modern web features" have very few actual features that make development easier.

That depends on the subjective definition of "easier", but most of these frameworks use abstractions that are too complex and not worth the value they deliver. They ironically make development more difficult, since there are more moving parts, more concepts to understand, and more things to break, which in turn makes the user experience much, much worse.

The entire idea of writing fake HTML that gets parsed, compiled, and interpreted in JavaScript to manipulate the DOM at runtime is wrong. The concept of a virtual DOM, diffing, reconciliation, and a bunch of related nonsense, is wrong. The insanity of an entire ecosystem of tools built around solving client-side state management. The trend of moving everything, including CSS, to be interpreted in JS is insane. Abstractions like Tailwind that shouldn't exist in the first place, which are then further abstracted away by abominations like daisyUI. The numerous frameworks that promise to blur the line between frontend and backend development, only to fall flat on their face when the insanity of the approach becomes apparent, but not before amassing a significant user base in the process. The fact most web developers have accepted that 100MB+ of dependencies are required to show a "Hello World!" in a web browser. The idea that every web site must be a SPA, and the numerous hacks around that to make it work like a traditional web site. I could go on, and on...

The popularity of these tools and ideas is not an indication that they lead to a sane, let alone optimal, development environment. It just means that the field has become dominated by influencer developers, to the point that junior developers entering the field are not aware of other ways of building web applications. After all, React and Vue stand out in a CV much more than JavaScript. It's practically unheard of to be considered a web developer without having one of these frameworks under your belt, so it becomes a reinforcing loop.

> It hasn't. At least not in the direction you want.

That's not true. JavaScript in web browsers is a stable, modern language. HTML has received numerous transformative updates over the years, such as the `template` element we're discussing here. The evolution of CSS has been mind-boggling, and difficult to keep track of. Gone are the cross-browser quirks and incompatibilities, which is mostly due to Google dominating the web, but that's beside the point. Web servers have become more flexible and easier to deploy. And so on.

Frameworks like Datastar prove that web development can be much simpler, and deliver better user experiences in a fraction of the complexity of traditional frameworks. This is not because it reinvents the same abstractions used elsewhere, but because it takes a first principles approach and rejects building on top of the existing pile of abstractions. It leverages proven technologies such as Server-Sent Events, and doesn't reinvent the wheel. If you've seen the demos and examples, the results speak for themselves.

It's not difficult to imagine a similarly simplified workflow becoming standard across web clients and servers. All it would take is an industry-wide push to bring all existing technologies together in a cohesive package. We're not technically far from that, so frameworks like Datastar are still needed, but we definitely don't need the bloated frameworks of yore.