Back to the SSR

The Deno blog entry The Future (and the Past) of the Web is Server Side Rendering is touching important points: website size, speed, and robustness. I became more aware of Deno because Netlify is running their Edge Functions in Deno, and because the Shop Talk Show has an interesting talk with Ryan Dahl in its episode 546: Ryan Dahl and Deno. Ryan previously invented the Node.js project, and now he is with Deno on his second big invention project. What´s going on with Deno needs attention, in my view.

Some quick notes from the blog article:

• In the past 10 years, the median size for a desktop webpage has gone from 468 KB to 2284 KB, a 388.3% increase.
• For mobile, this jump is even more staggering — 145 KB to 2010 KB — a whopping 1288.1% increase.
• We’re building complex apps for every screen size and every bandwidth. People might be using your site on a train in a tunnel. The best way to ensure a consistent experience across all these scenarios, while keeping your code base small and easy to reason about is SSR (Server-Side Rendering, as opposed to Client-Side Rendering (CSR), that comes along with Single Page App frameworks, like React, Angular, Vue, and others).
• Performant frameworks that care about user experience will send exactly what’s needed to the client, and nothing more. To minimize latency even more, deploy your SSR apps close to your users at the edge. You can do all of this today with Fresh and Deno Deploy.

Whenever possible, I prefer Server-Side Rendering over Single Page Apps and Client-Side Rendering. Also, Edge makes sense to me.^[1] You can have all of that without the Fresh framework, but because the Deno folks for sure know what they are doing, it will be interesting to follow their activities.