I chuckled reading this. It’s like someone landed in 2020 and learned web development while being completely unaware of events in the preceding decade.
Server side rendering is about dynamically generating HTML code. Client side rendering generates DOM objects in memory, and only rarely generates HTML strings. And then there’s actual rendering, which generates pixels on a display.
People who aren’t familiar with web development often conflate these concepts.
To quote Rich Harris, the author of Svelte, on the whole web component saga: "It's almost as if congealing 2010-era best practices in the platform before we'd finished exploring this territory was a mistake" [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1513668040784814084
Note that they mean SSR specifically here vs. just server-generated web pages. Server-rendering of component updates is a post-SPA innovation (2018?), so it still seems worth explaining for most web developers.
Absolutely not true. I was doing this in 2009 and so were many other people (albeit through janky XMLHttpRequest via PHP polling ways).
My assumption is that the WebKit team understands their average web developer (which may be notably different than an average HN developer) enough to know whether an explanation is worthwhile.
If you’re talking about something like just React (the view layer), you can certainly go back well beyond 2010.
If you’re talking about something more full-featured, like Next.js today, the oldest I can think of is Ember with its FastBoot, which was becoming usable by the end of 2014 and well-established by mid-2015 (even if 1.0 took until mid-2017—and there was a major internal restructuring to how building worked). https://blog.emberjs.com/inside-fastboot-the-road-to-server-... is good background on that, showing also the attitudes of the time. https://blog.emberjs.com/tag/fastboot/ for the other couple of posts about it.