> many modern websites and web-based applications deploy a technique called “server-side rendering” whereby programs running on a web server generate HTML markup with the initial content for web browsers to consume, instead of fetching content over the network once scripts are loaded
I chuckled reading this. It’s like someone landed in 2020 and learned web development while being completely unaware of events in the preceding decade.
It's like Isaac Asimov's short story, "A Feeling of Power" about a far future where humanity had forgotten how to do math manually and relied entirely on expensive computers to do it. But then a technician discovered the rules of arithmetic on paper and the revolutionary new human powered "graphitics" allowed them to win "the war".
client-side rendering was coined because server-side rendering was the default.
now that client-side rendering is ubiquitous, being explicit about server-side rending became necessary and along lost in translation became "technique" - is what I think happened here.
Probably too late to change now, but I wish the term ‘rendering’ wasn’t used to describe completely different things.
Server side rendering is about dynamically generating HTML code. Client side rendering generates DOM objects in memory, and only rarely generates HTML strings. And then there’s actual rendering, which generates pixels on a display.
People who aren’t familiar with web development often conflate these concepts.
> It’s like someone landed in 2020 and learned web development while being completely unaware of events in the preceding decade.
To quote Rich Harris, the author of Svelte, on the whole web component saga: "It's almost as if congealing 2010-era best practices in the platform before we'd finished exploring this territory was a mistake" [1]
> I chuckled reading this. It’s like someone landed in 2020 and learned web development while being completely unaware of events in the preceding decade.
Note that they mean SSR specifically here vs. just server-generated web pages. Server-rendering of component updates is a post-SPA innovation (2018?), so it still seems worth explaining for most web developers.
Agreed, it was super common. I'm attempting to say something slightly different, which is that SSR — as a technique that was codified, named, and supported in modern frameworks — first appeared around 2018 by my recollection, and so may be a new-ish concept for many web developers.
My assumption is that the WebKit team understands their average web developer (which may be notably different than an average HN developer) enough to know whether an explanation is worthwhile.
If you’re talking about something like just React (the view layer), you can certainly go back well beyond 2010.
If you’re talking about something more full-featured, like Next.js today, the oldest I can think of is Ember with its FastBoot, which was becoming usable by the end of 2014 and well-established by mid-2015 (even if 1.0 took until mid-2017—and there was a major internal restructuring to how building worked). https://blog.emberjs.com/inside-fastboot-the-road-to-server-... is good background on that, showing also the attitudes of the time. https://blog.emberjs.com/tag/fastboot/ for the other couple of posts about it.
I chuckled reading this. It’s like someone landed in 2020 and learned web development while being completely unaware of events in the preceding decade.