I disagree a bit with the article's implication that putting more code on the client leads to a loss of control. With web programming, there is no way to have full control. Even if you avoid JavaScript on the client and concentrate all the code on the server, the server output still has to be rendered by the browser, and you don't control that. You have no control over what browser is being used, what settings have been applied to the browser, the level of resources available on the client machine, what other programs are running, and so on.
I've come to the realization that unless you're OK with some very clunky front-end, there's just no way to avoid quite a bit of JavaScript on the client. Once you need to write a non-trivial UI heavy web app, you quickly realize that avoiding JavaScript on the client is a non-starter, as cool as that would have been.
The issues involve a lack of standardized sophistication of the web technologies, like HTML controls being clunky, very unsophisticated and hard to configure/style properly, CSS not being properly composable, HTML forms not implementing the full set of HTTP verbs, etc... To me these are fundamental problems with the web architecture that need solving.
Revamping the web architecture to properly support a sophisticated negotiation of control between the developer, the browser, and the end-user would greatly reduce, if not almost eliminate, all the thorny problems that declarative UI frameworks and libraries bring into focus.
W3C and WHATWG need to take a long hard look at what functionality is common to most frameworks that's missing from the default HTML/CSS spec and add it. It's literally their job and the existence of such a mass amount of frameworks that implement mostly the same things in slightly different ways means they're not doing it well.
There's bloat and then there's sending the exact same thing over the network quadrillions of times at every page load because it's not standard and everyone needs it.
I've come to the realization that unless you're OK with some very clunky front-end, there's just no way to avoid quite a bit of JavaScript on the client. Once you need to write a non-trivial UI heavy web app, you quickly realize that avoiding JavaScript on the client is a non-starter, as cool as that would have been.
The issues involve a lack of standardized sophistication of the web technologies, like HTML controls being clunky, very unsophisticated and hard to configure/style properly, CSS not being properly composable, HTML forms not implementing the full set of HTTP verbs, etc... To me these are fundamental problems with the web architecture that need solving.
Revamping the web architecture to properly support a sophisticated negotiation of control between the developer, the browser, and the end-user would greatly reduce, if not almost eliminate, all the thorny problems that declarative UI frameworks and libraries bring into focus.