API proposed by Chrome: Declarative partial updates(developer.chrome.com)
30 pointsby theanonymousone9 hours ago6 comments
  • dfabulich4 hours ago
    Declarative partial updating "sets the stage for client-side includes." https://github.com/WICG/declarative-partial-updates

    The linked article suggests a potential syntax:

      <template for="footer" patchsrc="/partials/footer.html">
    That would transclude the content of /partials/footer.html in your HTML.

    But the road ahead for this is still quite bumpy. Here's a good video from a year ago, talking through the obstacles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0NBcve0enY

  • nofriend5 hours ago
    Very odd proposal. The new element syntax is perhaps the boldest choice. I wonder why they thought that was necessary. The idea of using this to defer rendering elements is also odd. So this would use a http long polling style? It really goes against several decades of progress in the web platform, where by now it's long established that you do this sort of thing with xhr. I'm amazed that they even put this in chrome, let along are saying things like "let sites use this new functionality right away even before this lands in other browsers" as if it's a sure thing.
    • kkarpkkarp4 hours ago
      > The new element syntax is perhaps the boldest choice

      Probably to not break anything in older browsers which hasn't adopted it yet: new tag will be simply ignored, that's my thinking

      > I'm amazed that they even put this in chrome, let along are saying things like "let sites use this new functionality right away even before this lands in other browsers"

      It is behind the flag, like every other new proposal they made. Even though some dev would like to use it right now (for regular site visitors, not for self testing), she can't.

      • 4 hours ago
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    • dfabulich4 hours ago
      The new element syntax is needed to signify DOM ranges that may cross the boundaries of HTML element trees.

        <p>
    <em>Some <?start name="hl"?>text</em>
    to replace<?end name="hl"?>.
  </p>
      Jake Archibald at Mozilla has a good video about this. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yARSOcqOWvY
      • kkarpkkarp4 hours ago
        I am puzzled then: so what would happen if the template will replace this island form your example with markup without closing `</em>`?
        • dfabulich4 hours ago

            <p>
    <em>Some replaced text
  </p>
          Which, by the HTML standard, will automatically close the `</em>` as the `</p>` closes.
  • fg1374 hours ago
    I scanned the page but didn't get -- why? What problem does it solve? Why is a browser in the business of taking care of content update? How is this better than existing solutions?
    • trueno4 hours ago
      From what I read, think HTMX. HTML streams top to bottom so this proposal means out of order streaming of html things. So handles a lot of delivery/rendering stuff that's frontloaded with react/js/etc. It doesn't touch state management though.

      Don't use chrome anymore but, I dunno if all browsers came to the table and unified behind something like this I'd be all about it. Most of the web stacks seem like some weird polished turd solution where we started frontloading more and more onto javascript, so I am amusingly not against this proposal. Feel like it could be a step into a better direction for web technologies, which feel like a very odd/lost ship in the world of software.

  • BigJono4 hours ago
    Wtf?

    I can't really tell how you'd even use this. Is it supposed to be some sort of micro-optimisation thing to do with how HTML is parsed (now you can download chunks out of order, presumably with some performance gains since it's browser native?).

    When I saw the title I was hoping it was going to be a very simple React-like API for constantly updating parts of the DOM with maximum performance since the browser devs are now involved. It doesn't look like that's what this is at all. And all these years later I'm still wondering why browsers aren't implementing an API like that when it's been obvious for over a decade now that real-time DOM updates are a vital browser feature that needs to be performant, and that developers vastly prefer a declarative model to a procedural one. Why after 15-16 years are we still building 100 versions of the same abstraction in user-land to turn Element.append into "refresh these elements when this data changes"?

    • khana23 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • ComputerGuru5 hours ago
    Is this a Google-only proposal? Has Mozilla provided their thoughts on the matter?
  • michaelmrose5 hours ago
    So htmx?
    • iddan5 hours ago
      But native