Replace, don't diff
I have been playing with Declarative Partial Updates in Chrome, a small new primitive that lets the server mark a region of a page and later stream a template that replaces it. It turns out a lot of the things we reach for a framework to do, live regions, streaming SSR, islands, even an HTMX-style experience, fall out of it with little or no client-side JavaScript. So I built a pile of demos and started wondering out loud whether we still need the virtual DOM.