<template>: The Content Template element

There is untapped potential for building modern web sites by leveraging standard web technologies, such as the template element, and sidestepping a whole bunch of bloated abstractions that plague most modern web frameworks. Essentially, we need the simplicity of old school web development married with modern web features.

There are a few modern libraries and frameworks that trend in this direction: Nue, Datastar, Lit. The DX and UX with these is a breath of fresh air.

I've experimented with this approach myself with Miu[1]. It doesn't quite integrate with Web Components nicely yet, but it's almost there. I have some bones to pick with the WC standard, but that's a separate matter.

My wish is that modern web development can eventually not require any 3rd party libraries or frameworks, just like in the early days. Web developers got used to these because of limitations of native web APIs, but the web has grown leaps and bounds since then. Before the modern workflow became standard, it was magical to open a text editor, and have a functioning web page within a few minutes. No dependencies, no build step, no nonsense. Let's bring that back, please.

[1]: https://github.com/hackfixme/miu

I wrote a couple of blog posts on why we should add native templating to the DOM so we'd need fewer libraries.

The time is right for a DOM templating API: https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/26/the-time-is-right-for-a...

What should a native DOM templating API look like?: https://justinfagnani.com/2025/06/30/what-should-a-dom-templ...