prerender VS declarative-shadow-dom

So then just to experiment, I set up https://github.com/prerender/prerender on my own VPS in like an hour... and done & dusted... no more effort needed to think about SSR issues anymore. Seems great, and I can't figure out why it's not more popular.

Spending like 1 hour setting up prerender on my server is much preferable to the ongoing issues that come with having to make all my code work with SSR frameworks. And there's the added bonus that my servers don't need to waste resources doing SSR for regular human users.

Here’s an alternative that I use: https://prerender.io and GH is https://github.com/prerender/prerender

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/92.0.4512.0 Safari/537.36 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/91.0.4472.114 Safari/537.36 Prerender (+https://github.com/prerender/prerender) ...

Ah, I didn't realize this wasn't solved -- a quick search turns up:

- https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/788

- https://github.com/w3c/DOM-Parsing/issues/58

- https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/494

- https://web.dev/declarative-shadow-dom

In pre-render they seem to have started in this direction extremely recently:

https://github.com/prerender/prerender/pull/731/files

I don't use prerender so I can't definitively speak to it being solved and hiccup-free, but I think that limitation is going to go away in the future.

Using something like: https://github.com/prerender/prerender

Have you used prerender - https://github.com/prerender/prerender ? Seems to be doing the same thing.

Take a look at Declarative Shadow DOM: https://github.com/mfreed7/declarative-shadow-dom

Hmm, I see that Chromium shipped their implementation a year ago now; I had missed that. Other than that, there’s been no real change in the situation in the last almost two years (since Shoelace 2.0 was released, the last time I examined the situation). And there still doesn’t look to be any real interest in actually implementing it outside of Google: Mozilla are unenthusiastic though not against it <https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#declarative-s...>, and WebKit still find fault with some aspects of the design (https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-February/..., https://github.com/mfreed7/declarative-shadow-dom/issues/9), though they’re content most of the earlier issues are ironed out.

So you certainly can’t rely on scriptless server-side rendering of Shadow DOM being possible—it’ll work in Chromium only, and it’ll probably be at least another year or two before other browsers even contemplate doing anything with it.

(And of course, even once Shadow DOM is serialisable, that’s a far shot from a particular frameworky thing being SSR-compatible, but I was quibbling over the Shadow DOM and impossibility aspects, so I shan’t step back on that.)