web dev//rendering//CSR

Client-side rendering: the browser's JavaScript generates most of the content. The server sends the pieces and the instructions, and your browser builds the page.

Client-side rendering: the browser's JavaScript generates most of the content. The server sends the pieces and the instructions, and your browser builds the page.

Nearly empty HTML, then JavaScript loads, then data is fetched, then the DOM is complete.

What arrives over the wire is a shell, often a single empty container and a script tag; the page the user sees exists only in the DOM after scripts run. That is why simple crawlers, which read the fetched HTML and never execute JavaScript, see nothing (Crawler).

The fixes are on either side: the site can render on the server (SSR) or pre-render at build time, or the crawler can render (rendering crawler). This site is CSR with an edge function that injects content for bots, one of the hybrid answers.

CSR is not the same as a SPA: the first says where the HTML is built, the second says whether navigation reloads the document.