Since its introduction, the web has become the largest application platform available globally. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) has been an essential part of the web since the beginning, as it allows defining webpages in a tree-like manner, including semantics and content. Although the web was never meant to be an application platform, it evolved as such, especially since the early 2000s, as web application frameworks became available. While the emergence of frameworks made it easier than ever to develop complex applications, it also put HTML on the back burner. As web standards caught up, especially with milestones such as HTML5, the gap between the web platform and frameworks was reduced. HTML First development emphasizes this shift and puts focus on literally using HTML first when possible, while encouraging minimalism familiar from the early days of the web. It seems HTML-oriented web development can provide clear benefits to developers, especially when it is combined with complementary approaches, such as embracing hypermedia and moving a large part of application logic to the server side. In the context of the htmx project, it was observed that moving towards HTML can reduce the size of a codebase greatly while leading to maintenance and development benefits due to the increased conceptual simplicity. Holotype-based comparisons for content-oriented websites show performance benefits, and the same observation was confirmed by a small case study where the Yle website was converted to follow HTML First principles. In short, the HTML First approach seems to have clear advantages for web developers, while there are open questions related to the magnitude of the benefits and the alignment with the recent trend of AI-driven web development.

Web developers face two significant challenges when developing their applications and websites: latency and payload size. Given that web services rely on servers, the related communication incurs a cost in terms of latency. In contrast, the payload passed to the client incurs a communication cost, not to mention the computational cost to the client. The concept of serverless edge computing, built on top of content delivery networks (CDNs), is an approach that has begun to gain the attention of web developers for its promise of lower latencies due to its efficiencies in communication thanks to globally distributed networks and replication. Islands architecture is a technical approach that addresses payload size by giving developers easy ways to defer and potentially even avoid the cost of loading content. Combined, these two approaches form edge-powered islands and, in this article, we examine how the combination can help to address these two notable costs web developers have to consider in their daily work. Our findings indicate that edge-powered islands can provide a way to introduce interactivity to otherwise static websites while wrapping dynamic portions of a page within islands to gain the benefits of static approaches in more dynamic contexts, such as storefronts. In addition, islands can provide loading benefits even for more application-like websites, such as social networks, and give web developers an additional control layer in their development work.