lapis

2 neat libraries I've found to work like this are Surreal[1] and CSS-Scope-Inline[2] to get your Locality of Behavior (and Style) without a huge overhead. That said, your markup can get unwieldy fairly quick, and you end up with a lot of similar and duplicated code/style blocks. My solution on a personal site, was to also use a backend-style templating library with partials[3], a file watcher[4] to build them automatically etc to kind of SSG a static site while maintaining reusable components. You can see where this is going, at what point does it make sense to just "reach for xyz framework" out of the gate? For as often as people (especially here) cry "ya aint gonna need it", there are at least as many times where people (less vocally) cry silently to themself, "I wish I'd just used a framework instead of unintentionally building a frank

it's still used heavily in some roblox games (they moved to their own implementation with convenience features) and openresty. https://github.com/leafo/lapis also, minor observation: https://lua.org/about.html#name

One thing people might need to keep in mind is that Lapis isn't particularly interested in adding features that itch.io doesn't need. Been almost a decade since websocket support was requested e.g. https://github.com/leafo/lapis/issues/233