> For example, I don’t see why browsers can’t furnish basic list and table views that are capable of efficiently recycling their cells without any (or extremely minimal) JavaScript.
The web was built with documents in mind, so that the html files already has all the data needed for display. The tables are already populated with all the data needed and in the correct order from the server. There is no need for recycling cells and rows. And all of that is snappy because we're talking about KBs of data for thousands of rows.
Even static pages can get to be too large with a certain number of rows and would benefit from a variant of HTML’s table element that automatically recycles rows while displaying static data.
The problem isn’t the size of the transmitted data but the strain the resulting page puts on the browser engine due to the huge number of DOM nodes.
The web was built with documents in mind, so that the html files already has all the data needed for display. The tables are already populated with all the data needed and in the correct order from the server. There is no need for recycling cells and rows. And all of that is snappy because we're talking about KBs of data for thousands of rows.