Suprise! It's Server Rendering!

For years, building software that feels smooth, animated, and app-like has often meant reaching for a JavaScript-driven Single Page App (SPA) architecture. But over the last couple of years, the web platform has quietly changed that assumption.

Using the browser’s built-in CSS View Transitions API, server-rendered applications can now create seamless visual continuity between page navigations: fading, sliding, morphing, and preserving context during navigation without taking over routing, data fetching, or rendering in the browser. And it can do this without a single line of JavaScript!

This talk explores how Django developers can use the native View Transitions API to make classic multi-page applications feel like a modern SPA, while maintaining all app and routing logic on the server.

We will look at an example of a modern, multi-tenant project management tool, exclusively using server-side rendering. Along the way, we’ll discuss where View Transitions shine, where they fall short, and how to design interactions that feel modern without rebuilding your app as a frontend monolith.

By the end, attendees will understand how to add polished, app-like transitions to Django applications using mostly HTML and CSS.