[peterhunt]

The main benefit is the flexibility to seamlessly move this logic from server to client and vice versa without rewriting all of your code.

Purely server rendered apps tend to have much slower interactions and exhibit weird behaviors so it is valuable to be able to do some stuff on the client.

[timr]

This is a straw man. There's no such thing as a "purely server rendered app", and never has been (except maybe in the pre-JS days of the internet). At the end of the day, all webpages are produced by a server, and rendered by a client.

The only reason that server-rendered apps are "slower" is because people don't think about what they're doing, and leap right to 100% client-side rendering. Very few things actually need the latency guarantees of client-side rendering.

[timw4mail]

And when you have to go to the server to get data, it's often slow with a client-side 'app' anyway.

The client-side part doesn't make data transfer any faster.

[timr]

Right, exactly. I almost wrote something about that, but stopped myself. It's a very common pattern for people to move everything to an SPA for "latency", but then treat the data channel to the browser as if it's a app-server database connection, which is the same thing, but worse.

[peterhunt]

Calling this argument a strawman is pretty dismissive and is not a technical arugment. There are lots of client side interactions that do not need to be blocked on data from the server. Popup menus, modals, collapsible lists, rich text editing etc.

Also think about what actually has to happen when you interact with a server rendered app vs a client rendered app. Once the client app is booted you don't have to pay network latency, html parsing, FOUC etc on every interaction as you would with a server rendered app.

[timr]

> Calling this argument a strawman is pretty dismissive and is not a technical arugment.

It's quite literally a technical argument, and not "dismissive" in the slightest. My first sentence tells you why it's a strawman: there is no such thing as a "server-rendered" app. The framing of the original comment was black-and-white, when reality is (and has always been) shades of gray. Webapps have, since basically the earliest days of the internet, a question of where you draw the line between server-side and client-side rendering. Leaping to SPAs is just as lazy and thoughtless as trying to do everything on the server.

> There are lots of client side interactions that do not need to be blocked on data from the server. Popup menus, modals, collapsible lists, rich text editing etc.

Yes, of course. And if you implement your popups, modals, accordions and whatnot via asynchronous server calls, you are doing it in a silly way that guarantees bad performance.

There's a middle ground. For example: you can trivially render top-level dynamic elements (like menu content) into a SSR page. It doesn't require an SPA, yields imperceptible UX latency, and allows you the ability to do things like SEO without crazy infrastructure.

(Oh, and you don't need to "boot the app" in the browser. That's latency too.)

[peterhunt]

There's clearly something else going on here because I am having trouble following this argument.

You pretty clearly laid out what you meant by server rendered in your original comment:

> Were I forced to write a website today, it’d still end up looking similar to a traditional Django server-side rendering system with pages, and deep links, and all that.

Nowhere did I advocate leaping to SPAs for no reason. I simply made the case - and stand by it - that building with the same set of technologies client and server side leads to more flexibility and less code.

Re: the comment about booting the app, I think that is one of the strongest arguments in favor of server rendered apps, which is why I qualified my comment to "interactions", which happen after the page loads.

I lived through the server-rendering-only days of the original Hotmail client, and the php-plus-jquery spaghetti era. They were terrible for developers and terrible for users. Going backwards would be a huge mistake.

[timr]

> Were I forced to write a website today, it’d still end up looking similar to a traditional Django server-side rendering system with pages, and deep links, and all that.

I didn't write this. You're confusing me with someone else.