[tshaddox]

Nothing about the developer experience of React seems better than any old HTML template language (and hardly better even than plain HTML), if you're not doing any interactivity and are just going to render once and spit out the HTML.

[cercatrova]

Have you used React before? It's miles above HTML templating. I honestly don't use frameworks that have regular templating anymore, like Vue or Svelte.

[tshaddox]

I have used React. I'm a huge fan and I also prefer it over its most common "competitors" like Vue and Svelte.

But React (like Vue and Svelte) are fundamentally about interactivity. If I had a project where I knew for sure that I only wanted to generate HTML sans JS on the server (or with a static build process) I wouldn't even consider using React.

It barely even makes sense. Your "React components" would just be JavaScript functions that take props and return some JSX. None of the interesting React features and hooks would even make sense, other than maybe context (and presumably most or all popular static HTML templating tools have comparable features).

[munbun]

JSX is much easier to maintain than pretty much every other templating language.

If you are building a growing design system with any degree of complexity, React is one of the best tools available.

[dsego]

Which looks nicer? Eta vs JSX

   <%~ includeFile('./navbar', { pages: [
     'home',
     'about',
     'users'
   ] }) %>

   <navbar pages={['home', 'about', 'users']} />

> would just be JavaScript functions that take props and return some JSX

They can also be async functions that process data independently. Whereas templates are commonly just passed in data from the controller.

https://github.com/dsego/ssr-playground/#jsx-partials

[acdha]

Yes. JSX is nice for escaping by default but encourages total spaghetti coding hiding app logic in the templates and various footguns like non-standard attributes className and breaking id. Running it on the server side mitigates the React performance hit somewhat but the selling point is interactivity.

[alanwreath]

What are you referring to? I am unaware of what “regular” templating you’re referring to or what react is achieving that is not available or cumbersome under react or svelte.

I mean if JSX is considered as something particularly powerful (not saying it does) doesn’t Vue actually do that https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/render-function.html ?

[zdragnar]

Think of JSX as a macro, rather than "regular" templating, which is typically string substitution.

For static sites, this means that you get functions and objects the entire way through the render pipeline right up until there is a full tree built and the final output is rendered.

You still get all the separation powers of contexts, the component based reusability, etc, and it is all regular JavaScript / typescript except for the JSX macro itself and React's APIs (which are just JavaScript). Conversely, with templating engines like handlebars / erb / et al you need to learn the specific DSL of the template engine- custom loops and controls, imports for partials, and your custom helpers are limited to what they can do. Even Vue's render function has special markup for control (v-if, v-else).

[ricardobeat]

Some day we have to stop repeating this nonsense. JSX requires much more learning than simple templating, there is no inherent benefit. Even a simple conditional is more complex than your average template.

[zdragnar]

How so? Any expression is valid within JSX- ternaries, function calls, binary and unary operators are all valid. If you know JavaScript, you already know all of the control mechanisms that are valid.

[cercatrova]

The thing is, if you know JS, then a conditional is JSX is the same as in JS. Contrast that with every new templating language under the sun which might have its own way of doing conditionals and loops and control flow. That to me is much more annoying.

[chrismorgan]

This is a dubious claim, since JSX is limited to expressions. If you ask people for “a conditional in JS”, they’ll very probably go for `if (…) { … } else { … }` first, not `… ? … : …` (if you can even rewrite it as a ternary). Same deal with loops: you’re limited to expressions, so you can’t use the normal way of writing a loop (and this regularly leads to mild contortions as you deal with iterables of diverse types). Therefore I’d tend to (qualifiedly) describe JSX as doing its own thing too.

[9dev]

But you’re aware JSX is just plain old PHP files, code intermingled with HTML? It’s the exact same thing, and it breeds the exact same bad behaviour.

[nsonha]

> Nothing about the developer experience of React seems better than any old HTML template language

Is that a joke? You get autocomplete from typescript and props to be fully typed functions, or any kind of object for that matter. That compares to autocomplete that's just some ad-hoc, bug ridden tools that locks you into some IDE or editor, and who cares because all the attributes have the same type (string) anyway.