remote-standalone VS htmf

I published this article on Template Animation (aka DOM Templating) 12 years ago:

https://benkoworks.com/your-templating-engine-sucks-and-ever...

It fits nicely with this goal. My colleagues and I created a tool that allows HTML developers to work in HTML by compiling HTML using a Chrome extension, and then allowing developers to compile the same in their code platform of choice and operate on the DOM:

https://github.com/iaindooley/Fragmentify

https://github.com/iaindooley/fragmentify-js

Even if you're doing a SPA you can use this same method, by sending updates over the wire and doing the processing on the server. We created a standalone package that facilitated that by loading the initial page from the server then transparently allowing the server to send just the changes to the page and having them applied on the client side:

https://github.com/dgrinton/remote-standalone

The combination of "remote" and "fragmentify" and Template Animation/DOM Templating, in my opinion, would be a tremendous "retreat to move forward" in web development technologies.

Many years ago a colleague and I wrote a stand-alone version of a package for my own arcane php framework called Remote.

The idea was that you write in Web 1.0 and immediately get a Web 2.0 front end because it just updates what it needs to.

I still think this is the holy grail of frontends:

https://github.com/dgrinton/remote-standalone

I've successfully used this pattern (HTMX hypermedia style) to create an offline-first web app SPA[^1]. One of the pages is pretty dynamic and I wasn't sure if I would need a traditional front end library to work with it. But, nope, hypermedia to the win, it worked fine without a front end framework.

To build it I used my own library called HTMF[^2]. I started out using mpa-enhancer[^3] but found that that pattern is a little to janky sometimes. I think reloading a page every time on every interaction uses too many resources for a browser especially when you use a phone that doesn't have as much power as a laptop.

But overall I find the pattern very easy to use and keeps the complexity down.

I think some of the issues with traditional SPAs is that they have a lot of state and state is nonlinear in complexity. But using templating systems makes the complexity more linear in nature.

Also, I find libraries like React to be overly complex for what it does, see above. The way React works is just odd and counter intuitive. All for problems that are easy to solve. I do think there are places for a React-like library is needed but those are for websites that are inherently highly state-based. But most websites aren't state-based even ones that appear to be state-based at first.

The websites I work on are usually just forms and forms are pretty powerful and can get you a long ways before you need to go outside of that paradigm.

[^1]: https://github.com/jon49/Soccer

[^2]: https://github.com/jon49/htmf

[^3]: https://github.com/jon49/mpa-enhancer

I wrote a js lib similar to HTMX, which I call HTMF[1]. Unlike HTMX I try to stay as close to the metal of the current semantics as possible. So, all interactions are based off of forms. I also tried to keep the wording similar to HTML/JS semantics. It's pretty small lib but pretty amazing how far I can get with it. These days I mainly build offline-first apps with it. But I built it in such a way that it can easily be a progressive enhancement to an MPA app.

[1]: https://github.com/jon49/htmf