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That said... I'm not going to pretend it's an urgent need and will wait for these tools to mature.
“Server side rendering” is such a terrible term. The server isn’t doing rendering, the browser is. The server is sending a complete well-formed DOM for the client to render. Well done, modern devs! A plain .html file does that. I really hope some of the heavy front-end frameworks die a death, some common sense prevails, and we get a lighter, faster loading, more responsive web. I can dream.
And the future beyond that will be client-side rendering. In the beginning everything was rendered on the mainframe; then CICS allowed partial screen updates and even dynamic green screen design. Then the early web where everything was server which made the job of web indexing much easier. Then we moved back to rich client apps -- applets, flash, eventually SPAs -- with no way for search engines to easily index thing…
This server-client zeal to improve has been tremendously productive of good ideas over the last few decades. It will continue. Hopefully saving power and CO2 can be the focus of the next couple of turns of the great wheel.
The issue I have with SSR is that it offloads processing power onto the server. That means I have to pay more as the host instead of relying on user's browser to handle the compute "for free".
npm install common-sense
The issue I have with SSR is that it offloads processing power onto the server. That means I have to pay more as the host instead of relying on user's browser to handle the compute "for free".
The problem with this idea is that the user's browser's compute is not "free". Offloading the computing means the users have a worse experience, which will affect your userbase and page rankings.
There were a number of products that allowed a web app to maintain a 3270 connection to the mainframe and render the terminal screens as an HTML form. Fascinating stuff.
“Server side rendering” is such a terrible term. The server isn’t doing rendering, the browser is. The server is sending a complete well-formed DOM for the client to render. Well done, modern devs! A plain .html file does that. I really hope some of the heavy front-end frameworks die a death, some common sense prevails, and we get a lighter, faster loading, more responsive web. I can dream.
Apache used to be a good server side renderer too but those were the old days.