Astro

Most websites are largely text and images with a few interactive spots. Common frameworks nevertheless treat them as an application and ship the entire JavaScript bundle - including for pages where nothing happens. Astro inverts the default: HTML is delivered, and JavaScript only for the areas that genuinely need it.

Those areas are called islands. A menu that opens, or a filter that reorders content, is loaded as a self-contained island while the rest of the page stays static HTML. The result is very short load times - not through optimisation, but because less is delivered.

A practical convenience is that the choice of UI library stays open: React, Vue, or Svelte can be used side by side for individual islands. For teams coming from different ecosystems, that takes the edge off a debate of principle.

The limit is where an application consists mostly of interaction. A dashboard with continuously dynamic data is not a case for Astro - frameworks built around a running browser application exist for that. For marketing sites, documentation, blogs, and shops with many content pages, the calculation is clear.