server side pre-rendered messages shouldn't get shipped to the client

[samuelstroschein]

Context

If a message is pre-rendered (SSG or SSR), there is no need to ship the message to the client, if the message is static (takes no arguments). See #88 (comment)

// happy_elephant = This is a message in English. 

<p>{m.happy_elephant()}</p>

The HTML is rendered as

<p>This is a message in English</p>

Given that the message is static (takes no arguments like username), there is no need to ship the message function to the client. The message will aways be This is a message in English

Proposal

Figure out how to avoid shipping static messages that are pre-rendered to the client.

[samuelstroschein]

Tricky one.

The client needs the message for client-side hydration. I have to look into frameworks to see if replacing the expression <p>{m.foo()}</p> with <p></p> will make hydration work because frameworks skip over empty HTML tags. The server would SSR <p></p> as <p>example text</p>

In any case, research in #425 has shown that MPAs (Server side rendering + client side routing like SvelteKit) need to receive the message over the network to render pages.

[samuelstroschein]

I dug into a front-end framework to see how they hydrate. Svelte hydrates the HTML by completely re-rendering it even if the text of an HTML node is static.

<p>Hello world, how are you?</p>

import { a as append, t as template } from "../chunks/C2OGyoPZ.js";
import "../chunks/DmGnqJ7V.js";
+var root = template(`<p>Hello world, how are you?</p>`);
function _page($$anchor) {
  var p = root();
  append($$anchor, p);
}
export {
  _page as component
};

This indicates that even if we optimize messages to be static via an AST transform in a bundler, the optimization has no effect because frameworks load the static text anyways.

In a NextJS project with RSC, no JS is shipped to the client, which makes this optimization redundant and is the first time I understand RSC's value.

What's next? Frameworks need to optimize this themselves it seems like