JSX vs HTM

[iandunn]

HTM seems like a solid templating system, and better than JSX in some ways. It was designed for buildless app, so it fits here very well.

One downside, though, is the familiarity the WP community already has w/ JSX. It's not a hard transition for new code, but updating old Gutenberg code would be a lot of work to do manually. Although maybe a codemod could do it easily?

Regardless, there could be resistance to a change of that magnitude, so if there's a way to make this work with JSX, that'd remove some potential friction.

It seems like it's technically possible to transpile JSX in the browser, but it'd be much, much slower than HTM.

xref WordPress/gutenberg#25077

[iandunn]

Although, that'd probably require people use the build step for production, so it's probably best to just stick w/ HTM as the baseline. People can always add complexity if they want/need it.

[iandunn]

There were some good points raised in this week's #core-js chat.

• HTM hasn't been widely adopted yet, so it'd be harder for new devs to get help with it, and find docs
• JSX could be transpiled by the browser during the development flow, and then by wp-scripts for production

[iandunn]

To make transpiling in the browser faster, maybe we could create a browser extension. That way the browser wouldn't have to download a script (especially during hard refreshes), and maybe it'd be cached as byte-code or something?