alt Hacker NewsIs there a reason why there seemingly aren't any frameworks to do all the fancy web flourish in a normal language and then have it compile down to plain HTML5 + CSS + SVG?
Replies
Reasons:
- Browsers don't "talk" any other language but JS
- All browser APIs are exposed through JS only
- You can't manipulate DOM except through JS
- You can't do "fancy web flourish" without manipulating DOM. If you target Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU, you'd have to first create your entire graphics lib + flourish + font handling and rendering + accessibility + ... from scratch. And load all that on every page load
- Any language compiling into WASM would still need JS-integration for any of the above. Including Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU
- Any language without JS and DOM semantics will need to account for that (e.g. GC on DOM nodes)
- Any language compiling to WASM would need to load its runtime to actually run (including any libs). See network tab for any such project. e.g. Blazor
Sounds like you might be looking for a Static Site Generator. Astro was already mentioned. There's plenty of others, mostly geared towards blogs. I also had success with docfx and MkDocs, both for project documentation.
astro is a modern framework "optimised for content heavy websites" i.e. vanilla assets mostly except when asked for something more.
There are. It is not necessary faster/more optimized approach.
not sure what you mean, but htmx might be what you are looking for?
You can compile almost any language to JS or WASM.
As to HTML + CSS: it goes other way around: HTML and CSS (or rather its subsets) are being integrated into "normal languages", like Qt, Java. I'm not sure I ever saw any technology that could serve as a replacement for HTML + CSS. May be Eclipse RAP or Blazor? But they are so heavy that React will look like a butterfly and they're not aiming to replace HTML/CSS but rather just use it as output medium for their UI.