[ErroneousBosh]

> It's terrible, why would I want my endpoints to return random HTML fragments?

What would you return instead? It's easy to generate HTML, because that's what your server is already generating (and that's about all it should generate).

[stefan_]

HTML is the last thing I would ever want to generate on my embedded device, it's a terribly verbose string-based mess invariably coupled with stylistic choices. Which is why my servers don't generate any of that, they serve static files - and any interactive information in something that looks a lot more like an interface definition.

[wrs]

I don’t get what you’re saying (maybe there’s a typo). With React, generating HTML on the embedded device is exactly what you’re doing — twice (virtual and real DOM).

[ErroneousBosh]

Okay, so what do you your servers actually serve stuff to?

I kind of don't get why if you want to display something in a web browser you'd generate anything other than HTML.

[leoedin]

I think the parent's point is that when you have a react front-end, your back-end basically just deals in structs of data. There's no HTML or templating to think about. It's just JSON-serialisable structs. That makes the code on the back end much simpler, which makes it easier to run in a resource-constrained environment.

The only exposure the back-end has to HTML is streaming the static files to the browser. Which can be done in small chunks.

If your back-end is rendering HTML with every request, it has to do a lot more work. It has to load HTML templates into memory and insert strings into them.

[ErroneousBosh]

Okay, so how do you actually show the stuff to the end user?

Just raw structs of data? Or do you turn that back into HTML?

Now you've got two sets of templates to cope with...

Why would I care about how much effort it is for the server to generate? It's already generating HTML from templates, and it's more-or-less infinitely capable of doing so.

[bccdee]

> It has to load HTML templates into memory and insert strings into them.

In practice, I doubt this is much slower than serializing JSON. Keeping a couple kilobytes of HTML templates in memory is nothing. Conversely, running a whole vdom on the frontend (typically more resource-constrained than the server) is a much bigger performance issue.

[stefan_]

Three levels down and people have entirely forgotten what my post was. My "server" is some anemic ARM core built into real physical hardware with 64M of read-only storage. I don't want it spending its time "hydrating" some DOM, I don't want to bring any of this frontend insanity on there at all. No code hosted on npm shall ever run on that processor or I can't go to sleep in peace.

So how do we still get a fancy SPA website? Build it all down to a simple zip bundle, the ARM can serve those static files just fine. The SPA talks to the ARM via a few JSON APIs. Very nice clean boundary.

[listenallyall]

Yes, if your server is a weak, limited processor, you want to keep the demands on it as low and lean as possible, and let the client do the heavy lifting. HTMX is not a good fit for this scenario, just like PostgreSQL is not a good database to embed on your devices.

This isn't a controversial idea and nobody would try to sell you on HTMX for your use case.

[array_key_first]

My understanding is that HTML templating is often cheaper server-side than JSON serialization.

[ErroneousBosh]

What's npm got to do with it?

Why can't your code fill in the blanks in some HTML template instead of filling in the blanks in some JSON?

[ErroneousBosh]

What's the difference between rendering HTML and rendering JSON?

Why are you then offloading rendering HTML from JSON to a painfully slow scripting language on the client?

[goodpoint]

This is plain false.