View Transitions for Websites!

🎉 View Transitions For Cross-Document Transitions

We’ve been dancing around different options for how to offer a browser-native way to provide animated transitions between pages for a very long time, and it seems we’ve finally got a winner.

The first phase of View Transitions targeted single-page applications, which made a lot of sense. But it looks like Chrome is ready to ship View Transitions support for the broader web now by enabling it for “Multi-Page Applications” (MPAs) or, as I still like to call them, websites (old man on cloud moment, but while I get that it’s a branding thing to position browser-native navigation as an alternative to SPA’s, I still think “Multi-Page applications” is probably the goofiest term I’ve ever heard).

It looks like they’re targeting a beta rollout for Chrome version 126 (currently scheduled for stable cut in June) with a stable rollout in version 127 (currently scheduled for stable cut in July).

With Firefox on board with the API as well, our decade plus search for solutions for page-to-page transitions may finally be coming to an end.

🏁 Portable Server Rendered Web Components == Fast

The folks at Begin have been doing really great, under the radar work for a long time. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend looking at Enhance.dev—it’s a framework built around server-rendered web components. I’ve used it on several projects and, frankly, it feels like working in the future. You get a lot of the same benefits you get from using isolated components in other systems, but you get it by writing plain old HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It feels like working with the browser instead of fighting against it, and the results (in my experience) have been blazingly fast.

They’ve recently created a WASM implementation that has enabled them to bring server-rendered web components to a bunch of different environments. They’ve also created a PHP implementation so you can start using the approach in conjunction with WordPress.

If you were to ask me what one thing happening in “framework” land has me most excited, it’s the stuff Enhance is doing by a pretty significant margin.

🫤 React in the browser?

“Browsers should just put React in the browser” is the new “Browsers should just put jQuery in the browser.”

Honestly, the fact that I can use that sentence should be enough to put an end to that conversation before it starts. Frameworks will come and go, and there’s all sorts of great reasons why “put framework X” in the browser just isn’t a particularly realistic idea.

But it is smart to look at what those tools are doing that people like and then trying to bring that functionality into the browser where it makes sense.

Jake and Surma’s latest “Off the Main Thread” does a really good job of discussing some of the work that’s happened to bring some of the developer ergonomics of frameworks into the web itself.