Wookash Podcast Delaney Gillilian | What Happens When You Question Web Defaults
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Feb 28, 2026 
Delaney Gillilan, a software engineer behind Datastar who builds ultra‑fast web tooling, talks about questioning web defaults. He explores hypermedia vs SPA trends, Datastar’s plugin‑first, spec‑driven approach, sending HTML instead of JS for performance, SSE streaming, and real-world migrations from React. Short, technical, and focused on practical web architecture ideas.
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Give The Browser HTML Not JSON
- Send HTML strings from the backend and let the browser parse and render them instead of sending JSON to be reassembled by JavaScript.
- Datastar streams rendered HTML patches per-row (even from SQLite) so the browser uses its native fast C-level HTML parsing.
Streaming HTML Unlocks Extreme Compression
- Modern HTTP compression (Brotli/ZStandard) plus streaming HTML yields massive effective compression because HTML patterns repeat.
- Datastar's approach achieves orders-of-magnitude smaller payloads by streaming similar HTML and leveraging browser compression dictionaries.
Billion Checkbox Demo Proved The Approach Scales
- A community member built a billion-checkbox demo with Datastar: 16 colors, virtual scrolling, global shared view, and it runs on a cheap host.
- The demo is 400 lines of ClojureScript and 10 KB of JS, showing tiny shims can outrun heavy SPA setups.