Yeah. I like the simplicity of htmx etc but network round trips are simply not suitable for a lot of interactions (at least if we’re talking about web apps). For a barebones approach I’d prefer tabs etc to be low-JS on top of a functional plain html page.
Personally I've landed on the balance of leaving rendering wherever the state lives.
In the tabs example, my question is always how dynamic and complex the tabs are. For fairly simple tabs its pretty clean to server render the HTML for all tabs and use a basic client-side script to handle navigation (ideally its synced in the URL as well).
For more complex tabs, or tabs heavily dependent on dynamic state, I find that its much easier to maintain long term if the rendering happens server-side. I personally have enjoyed HTMX for this to swap out an island of HTML, but a full page reload has worked for decades now.
In my experience the worst solution is shipping the complex state and the complex rendering logic to the browser. From performance to bug reproducibility, it has always cause me more pain that the DX original dev time are worth.
