Hi folks,
I’ve started this post to help me look for examples of a pattern I’ve been seeing more and more that a good number of talks at DjangoCon Conferences now reference, where we are shifting from:
- sending json back and forth over the wire with relatively ‘thick’ React/Ember/Vue clients that replicate logic client-side that we already implemented in the server, and instead
- using much less javascript in the browser, and sending html fragments that have been rendered server side instead
In the django ecosystem, we’re well served with htmx alphine.js and various django packages like django-htmx, and unicorn.
Partly as a result of a shared joke with @carltongibson over coffee one morning, we spoke about giving it a pronouncable name, a bit like Jesse James Garett proposed “AJAX” back in 2005 (yes, it’s been that long!).
One candidate was WNDR, for Web Native Dynamic Rendering, pronounced “wonder”.
It’s intended to capture this more dynamic aspect of server side rendering of html fragments, but also the focus on making as much use of the increasingly rich Web APIs that HTML provides.
You get a lot of functionality when you use the <form>, <input>, <a> <button> elements, that I often see re-implemented in javascript in a buggy way in some heavy client side apps, and this appreciation of HTML seems to be an attractive quality of the pattern.
Anyway, I’ve written some more below, with pointers to other examples of the patterns (or at least behaviour similar to this pattern), and I’m looking for other terms in use for this pattern.
https://rtl.chrisadams.me.uk/2025/01/parking-an-idea-wndr-for-web-native-dynamic-rendering/
The only other term I’ve found so far is HDA, standing for Hypermedia Driven Architecture, so I’d welcome other links to attempts to name and describe this pattern.
Hope it’s interesting to someone. Ta!