Framework · 2020–now · Platform Wars
Hypermedia / htmx
HTML as the engine of application state — a deliberate counter to SPA maximalism. Peak backlash; now a plateau, not a climb.
htmx stuck as a backlash against shipping megabytes to toggle a modal. It revives server-rendered ergonomics without surrendering interactivity. It will not kill React; it shrunk many apps that never needed it.
Patterns
Context
Frameworks fought for the runtime
Front-end frameworks consolidated power; TypeScript became table stakes; Next and friends absorbed routing, data, and deploy gravity. Serverless and Jamstack rebranded old ideas with better CDNs, then cooled when auth and personalization refused to stay static. Blockchain-for-CRUD and big-bang rewrites collected dumb budgets. The winners were boring platforms with ecosystems — React gravity, Rust where systems care, Vite for greenfield bundling. The losers were narratives that skipped product-market fit or treated every App Router rewrite as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Practice · 2014–2023
SPA for Every Page
Client-side apps as the only architecture. Great for apps; absurd for brochures.
$ Marketing sites and docs portals shipped multi-megabyte JS bundles for content that wanted HTML. SEO and performance teams spent years unwinding "modern" defaults.
Architecture · 2004–now
MVC web frameworks
Model-view-controller as the default web shape. Still how most server-rendered apps think.
Framework · 2005–now
Django
Batteries-included Python web. Still the adult choice when you want an admin, auth, and ORM that behave.