You don't even need a fancy "send html fragments over the wire" approach to create a better user and developer experience.

Just sending full pages, server side rendered, like Hacker News and Wikipedia do is fine:

Going from the HN homepage to this topic we are on:

    36 KB in 5 requests.

Going from the Wikipedia Homepage to an article:

    824 KB in 25 requests

Going from the AirBnB homepage to an apartment listing:

    11.4 MB in 265 requests.

Going from the Reddit homepage to a Reddit thread:

    3.74 MB in 40 requests

In comparison to AirBnB and Reddit, HN and Wikipedia feel blazingly fast. And I am sure the developer experience is an order of magnitude nicer as well.

basch

IF you want the page to be interactive without refreshes though, you gotta do something. Unless you are advocating a completely pre-ajax web.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

sodapopcan

"HTML over the wire" generally refers to tech like [0] LiveView, [1] Hotwire, [2] LiveView, [3] Blazor, etc. They aren't about about ditching JS and more about not writing your HTML in JS (and yes, SSR).

[0] https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view

[1] https://hotwired.dev/

[2] https://laravel-livewire.com/

[3] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...