You shouldn't be downvoted for saying this. As a server-side developer of 20 years the server-side templating languages have a lot to learn from the frontend experience. And I say this as a user of Smarty, Jinja2 and now Twig & nunjucks. Template inheritance is fantastic. But...
Being able to develop and test standalone HTML components using Storybook is a whole lot nicer than splitting a server-side template into components (which Twig certainly doesn't support cleanly), building a tool to render them and then maintaining your own component library. So normally we end up with HTML bits in Storybook which are copied and pasted into Twig templates, placeholders added and then you can guess they get out of sync.
I appreciate the argument that I should "use JS server-side and render ${js_fe_framework_of_choice} server-side" and it's valid. But I'd also like to be able to run components in _any language_ and get the same DX. Note none of this is talking about hydration - I'm wanting to leverage the JS FE frameworks as clever templating engines which output dumb HTML.
I'm talking entirely out of my rear end, but I'm curious if there is any validity to some of these projects that let you run pythonic code in the browser, either through Webassembly or brpython. For example, this projects https://github.com/stefanhoelzl/vue.py claims to let you write Vue.js in Python in the browser, which then gets turned into regular Vue.js components. I imagine a performance penalty, but a developer performance benefit of allowing something else to run on top and make a more composable experience.
Up the wrong tree :) Vue.py gives you a way to write Vue to run in the browser using a Pythonic syntax. I'm talking about running actual Vue code (or anything else in that style) server-side as Django templates.
Being able to develop and test standalone HTML components using Storybook is a whole lot nicer than splitting a server-side template into components (which Twig certainly doesn't support cleanly), building a tool to render them and then maintaining your own component library. So normally we end up with HTML bits in Storybook which are copied and pasted into Twig templates, placeholders added and then you can guess they get out of sync.
I appreciate the argument that I should "use JS server-side and render ${js_fe_framework_of_choice} server-side" and it's valid. But I'd also like to be able to run components in _any language_ and get the same DX. Note none of this is talking about hydration - I'm wanting to leverage the JS FE frameworks as clever templating engines which output dumb HTML.