[onion2k]

Sure the end compiled HTML is a mess, but that’s like complaining your bytecode or binary is messy. Who cares?

Everyone who downloads more data than necessary cares, or whose browser has to spend more battery power to parse that HTML, or who has to wait because you made a page that can't being rendered as it streams in, or any developer who needs to debug that mess in 2 years time because you couldn't write something simple and understandable and you've moved on to a new role.

(Not that any of those things are about semantic HTML specifically; they're more about caring about the structural output of your code.)

[wruza]

More than necessary for what? How do they even define this criterion?

And come on, html parsing is the cheapest thing of all that happen there. The most of work goes into font rendering and jpeg decompression. Every paragraph adds CPU workload incomparable to any amount of divs, literally tens of thousands of calculations, if your system uses hinting, kerning, etc.

who has to wait because you made a page that can't being rendered as it streams in

This is just a personal preference. At the times of 14.4k and no-images button in the toolbar it was useful, but not today when you can download a megabyte per ping time. I like to see sites as they were intended to be seen and not jump around and change colors with every chunk of html or css. I actually hate sites like that.

[onion2k]

I like to see sites as they were intended to be seen and not jump around and change colors with every chunk of html or css.

No one likes layout shifting. There's no reason why a site should be jumping around just because the HTML is being rendered as it streams though. Stopping layout shift is more to do with prioritizing layout CSS (inlining important styles for example), avoiding dynamic content injection (eg server side rendering instead of lazy loading content) and providing proper hints to the browser about where things should go, how big things are, and so on.

[wruza]

That’s what sites do today: they load everything via small bootstrap code, in prioritized chunks, and render them when it’s done. It’s not a developer’s fault that there is no browser-way to load apps with particular requirements. Browser is not a development/deployment platform, it’s just a target like ELF or PE. An average company or a person is unable to ship and maintain carefully crafted EXEs and stay in business, neither in web, nor in desktop. You’re talking about scene, not software development. Scene is cool. Scene is no business.

[onion2k]

That’s what sites do today: they load everything via small bootstrap code, in prioritized chunks, and render them when it’s done.

That's what sites did do until the last two or three years. Now things are moving back to server side rendering because it's a tiny bit faster for some use cases.

It’s not a developer’s fault that there is no browser-way to load apps with particular requirements.

Browsers have exactly that functionality for a small set of requirements. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Client_hin...