The time is right for a DOM templating API

Templates are great until they need to be dynamic. Then you're right back to the current situation where frameworks like React are just the better way.

In fact, you could call JSX a "Dynamic Templating System" and that's a reasonable summary of what it is (in addition to other things of course).

There might be some ways that React itself could, internally, notice the special cases and special times where it _could_ be slightly more performant from using a lower level of templating, as an optimization, but I'd certainly prefer that to be abstracted away and buried deep inside React, rather than ever having to think about it myself, at the JSX layer.

Someone can let me know if React is already leveraging this for browsers that support it, I didn't research that.

"If I could wave my magic wand..." at least 2 of 3 of the changes I'd made about the way frontend web is developed, would be about `<template>`s:

1. Making it possible to do something like <template src="..."> and being able to load them from an external source

2. Making them "dynamic"

3 (and the most controversial one) that all CSS, HTML and Javascript (if you don't hate it) could be written natively like QML - one syntax to rule them all.

The system described in the article is very React-like, and could be used by future versions of React. In both, functions return a description of HTML to render, which can be applied either to create new HTML or to update previously rendered HTML.

I skimmed part of it, but unless I missed some huge caveat I think you’re backwards and GP is definitely right. The article mentions React, then sort of dismisses it later saying the other two strategies are better to implement instead of diffing.

I don’t see any reason a browser level “here’s new DOM you diff and apply it” couldn't exist and be a huge win for React and other libraries, with React so much more popular than every other framework combined, and that being a pretty low level API, it makes sense to start there.

Building the overly abstracted thing first is a mistake web API authors have made too many times (see web components).

As a web dev you probably already know but #1 is slightly similar to `Web Components` but you're right we cannot load a web component right in the HTML where we use it. It makes sense though because if you use an Element in multiple places it wouldn't make sense to have 'src' in multiple places, so ultimately some kind of 'loading' at the top of the page is needed, and that's how WebComponents work, but I still like how you think.

#3 is a tricky one syntactically because HTML needs to be used by mere mortals and JS is a programming language used by us gods, so unifying all three would br tricky, but again I agree with you that would be awesome. Maybe some flavor of LISP would be both "powerful like a language" and "easy like a document".

I still have hope for Web Components to take off in the figure. I'm a React dev so I don't "need" them, but they may end up being some kind of capability that React can secretly, quietly embed into React core as some kind of optimization if that ever makes sense. Web Components is a great idea, but like I said it's just not quite as convenient as React, so it's currently somewhat irrelevant at least for me.

> 1. Making it possible to do something like <template src="..."> and being able to load them from an external source

I've done that, requires no build step/npm/whatever. It was posted on HN for discussion a week ago: https://github.com/lelanthran/ZjsComponent