HTML is Underrated

The web is a fantastic platform, but its power is not evenly distributed. Between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, HTML is the critical element as it loads, configures, and renders everything. Within all browser engines, HTML and CSS are rendered through a highly optimized rendering pipeline, typically written in C, C++, or Rust, and often rendering is accelerated with a GPU. Loading and rendering HTML is exceptionally fast, both on first page load and when the DOM is manipulated.

At Acumity, our decision-making process involved keeping technology choices as “boring” as possible. Given the constant change and risk introduced by AI, everything else needed to be exceptionally straightforward and “boring”. With this mindset, I wanted to avoid building an SPA for as long as possible. Once you are required to maintain both a JSON API and an SPA client, development velocity slows given the added complexity and team specialization. The idea was to focus on server-rendered HTML, add style using class attributes with DaisyUI (semantic Tailwind components), and add application behavior using htmx. The result was a hypertext application in the form of server-rendered HTML from an extensive directory of templates and partials… A Hypertext Application.

The interesting aspect for me was realizing that while JS performance has improved dramatically over time, so has server rendering performance. With data nearby, servers can render HTML with impressive speed for both full-page and partial rendering when using htmx. In effect, we reduced the application to a simple hypertext exchange of HTML pages and partials over XHR.

Having worked with countless JS and server frameworks for web development, I found this model to be the best I have ever experienced. Our team was able to deliver features productively, and our team velocity was about double what I expected. For example, we received an inquiry from a large company in Japan, which asked when we could localize our content into Japanese. Since everything was server-rendered, with the help of a Python library, we completed a full Japanese localization in 2 days. Since the application is a collection of server routes, it is trivial to test all the routes. I will build and advocate for more hypertext applications; they are fun to create and are exceptionally fast.

HTML is underrated.