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<template>: The Content Template element

(developer.mozilla.org)
217 points palmfacehn | 3 comments | 02 Sep 25 17:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.599s | source
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EGreg ◴[02 Sep 25 19:00 UTC] No.45107545[source]▶
What exactly is the point of <template> tag? Just to create document fragments? I mean that’s all you can really do with it in HTML. If you are using JS you can attach shadow dom to any element.

I guess maybe slots for web components is the other point?

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1. acdha ◴[02 Sep 25 19:09 UTC] No.45107642[source]▶
I’ve used it to have the server generate fragments not processed in the normal page load which are then used as templates by JavaScript which populates them. That supported fast initial page loads compared to an SPA while being just as dynamic after being loaded.

This worked pretty well but definitely had some rough edges which I really wish the standards process could’ve focused on. Things like JSX are so much slower / memory intensive but people use them for convenience and it’d be nice to improve the ease-of-use story.

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2. mikojan ◴[03 Sep 25 07:49 UTC] No.45113262[source]▶
Could you not achieve the same with a <div hidden>?
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3. Doxin ◴[05 Sep 25 11:27 UTC] No.45137343[source]▶
<template> tags don't do anything to their contents. You can for instance have an <img> tag in there without the image getting loaded, or a <script> tag which doesn't get executed.