Basecamp | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

The Future of Web Software Is HTML-Over-WebSockets  

Over at A List Apart Matt E. Patterson describes HTML-over-WebSockets:

What about multi-user chat? Or document collaboration? In classic frameworks and SPAs, these are the features we put off because of their difficulty and the code acrobatics needed to keep everyone’s states aligned. With HTML-over-the-wire, we’re just pushing tiny bits of HTML based on one user’s changes to every other user currently subscribed to the channel. They’ll see exactly the same thing as if they hit refresh and asked the server for the entire HTML page anew. And you can get those bits to every user in under 30ms.

Most interesting tech article I’ve read in a while.

Basecamp has been pushing this approach with Hotwire.

And Phoenix with LiveViews: