this drive to remake runat="server" worries me. i get the good intrnt to make pages fast, but making thin client pages like this radically reduces the general utility & agency of the web.
> i get the good intrnt to make pages fast, but making thin client pages like this radically reduces the general utility & agency of the web.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Remix and related technologies don't limit what you can do on the client—you still have the full power of React at your fingertips. The difference is that they blur the lines between client and server such that you get more or less seamless server-side rendering in order to populate a web page before you hydrate it client-side with React. If anything, Remix allows you to use React for more use cases where it otherwise would not have been the right tool.
a developr can limit the power of user-agency by moving increasing amounts of power to the server.
this trend amplifies developers potential. and it allows targetting "dumber" web clients. yay, good things. but it also makes the most advanced & competent web users less able & less capable. web apps have, for a while now, been fairly client-heavy, in a way that enables hacking & creativity. i'd love a strong counter-thesis for why this isn't the case, but this feels like a mainframization of computing, a push towards centralized control. it has upsides, as you point out, but also it keeps much more reserved & controlled & hidden. that is not very "web" like, tbh.
the SPA era was a fluke. what we're seeing with SSR adoption in the last few years is that all the new goodies we got used to in SPA frameworks are coming back in line with the traditional web model, where i get a new document from the service after each meaningful interaction
good discussion. still a worrying world to me.