[ryanbrunner]

There's downsides with every approach though. While taking a "render HTML and manipulate DOM" approach falls down hard when the DOM mutations become frequent or complicated enough that they take a performance toll, the alternative most commonly peddled, "ship JSON and let the client render everything" has increased in massively increased JS bundle sizes and horrendous initial load performance on many sites.

I suppose there's the alternative of "ship HTML and forget about Javascript for the most part", but very, very few people are following that nowadays, and besides which, JQuery supports a "Javascript not required" progressive enhancement model far far more than most other front-end frameworks.

[keanebean86]

I wrote a spa at my last job using jQuery. It rendered page fragments on a php backend, detached the current fragment, saved it, then appended the new fragment. If a fragment was already downloaded it would hydrate by ajaxing some json.

It was extra work and sometimes brittle but it was also my first "big" web project. Even though it didn't use all the cool new libs and build tools I still learned a lot from it.

[peteforde]

That's brilliant! Have you had the opportunity to play with Turbolinks 5? It sounds like there will be some crossover with what you have already done, but if you're intellectually curious, you might pick up some good tricks, too.

https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA&t=3m22s

TL5 just happens to pair beautifully with a tiny library called Stimulus, which would be YAF except that it's a) by the same team as TL5 and b) that team is also behind Rails, so there's some claim to legitimate best practices.

https://stimulusjs.org/

[keanebean86]

This is awesome! Thanks!