Blazor Static + HTMX :has anyone else gone down this road?
I've been building an hybrid Blazor CMS (+ api net 10) in production for a couple of years now (travel, ecommerce, booking, that kind of thing ) and at some point I had to make a decision about how to handle the frontend for public websites.
The problem I kept running into with Blazor Server on public sites is that freeze between pre-rendering and the SignalR circuit coming alive.
On desktop it's annoying. On mobile it's genuinely bad. I tried the multi-render mode approach that came in with .NET 8/9 and honestly it created more problems than it solved state reconciliation is a mess and the mental model doesn't really fit how public websites work.
WASM was never really an option for me either. Making anonymous users download a bunch of DLLs on first load just doesn't feel right for a public-facing site.
So I ended up going with Static Blazor + HTMX. And I know that sounds weird at first.
The thing I realized is that Static Blazor is basically a very modern, very capable MVC. Pure server rendering, no circuit, no overhead. And the part that clicked for me was that you can use the exact same Blazor component for the full page render and for the HTMX partial response. You just isolate it and pass everything through parameters. The component doesn't know the difference.
So you get the full Blazor component model while you're building, C# all the way down, proper reusability, and then HTMX handles the interactivity without any client-side framework weight.
I think the reason nobody really talks about this combination is that most Blazor devs are coming from the app world where Server or WASM make total sense. Public websites have completely different constraints and I don't see that discussed much here.
Anyway, curious if anyone else has gone this direction or ran into the same walls. Happy to get into the specifics if there's interest.