Post

@ryansolid.bsky.social thanks for the discussion on stream today! You asked on stream today to show you a trello or otherwise sufficiently complex app in datastar. Here is that as as well as a few others that opened my eyes a bit, as a former skeptic. kanban.jsonbateman.com

Thanks for posting. I would respond but @gabbev.bsky.social pretty much has it completely covered. He's not trying to be difficult. The first thing I do when playing around with an app is throttle the network and see if it holds up. I did that on stream too. I hope this thread serves as a reference.

I think with any approach you hit the same issues and there's nothing inherent with hypermedia that prevents you from working with slow/throttled networks while sacrificing UX.

I'm suggesting that because of their wheelhouse modern SPA frameworks tend to account for this category in their design. I view HyperMedia as lower level protocol. I don't see an issue communicating with HTML partials etc. There is just a lot that sits on top of that. bsky.app/profile/ryan...

From a DX standpoint, I sympathize. From a more theoretical one, I'm confused, given that my understanding is the fastest way to get fresh data shown in a browser is zstd/brotli compressed HTML morphed into the DOM. To wit I'd expect hypermedia to perform materially better in throttled conditions?

where is the data coming from? if it's from the network then network latency will almost always dominate any sort of local computation

Depends on what you're asking exactly. Do you mean how far is the connection from the data source? If so then you measure real world latency and determine if it's actually an issue.

This might be besides the reality of the situation: building web apps is fundamentally hard, and your choice of architecture may allow you to move the amount of fresh data you can easily manage up and down the scale. For some apps reasoning about local data models might be preferable, I agree.

But in my experience there are many apps where that is simply not the case. A realtime dashboard for example, the app I build for a living, benefits from the server-authoritative model, regardless of network latency.