Good SPAs are fantastic. It's just a lot of people suck when implementing them.
The Serverless documentation, an SPA, blew my mind in terms of how fast and clean it is: https://serverless.com/framework/docs/
The Serverless documentation, an SPA, blew my mind in terms of how fast and clean it is: https://serverless.com/framework/docs/
(Single Page Applications arguably have their place. I'm just really confused why you think this is a particularly good example.)
HN is my baseline for how fast a site should be.
You can test the difference yourself by toggling JavaScript in your browser.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/180628_AQ_c87264f303f9e72f...
The only reason that's faster as an SPA than static HTML is because they've disabled caching for static resources:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/180628_AQ_c87264f303f9e72f...
If the site was optimized it'd perform very similarly either way since there's none of the complex logic or interactions where an SPA really starts to shine and the content is very cache-friendly.
Have you tried browsing the site...?
As a user I don't care about the developer's aesthetic preferences for tooling, only how long it takes to see the information I need. This feeds back to the question of why an SPA matters: for a rich application, there's more benefit to cancel out the runtime overhead.
For static docs, your timing is off by at least one order of magnitude: I have to wait a second or more — a LOT more on a high-latency connection where that initial page load is 15+ seconds worse[1] – and there doesn't seem to be much benefit to compensate for that. I mean, the animation is cool the first time I see it but I see it a lot because there's less information on each page so the novelty wears off pretty quickly.
Again, please note the last part of my comment: there is a place for SPAs but I'm not sure why a site this simple needs 500KB of JavaScript to deliver static documentation slower than Apache did two decades ago. I was expecting to see a selling point such as loading the content so that it was usable offline and search results were instantaneous but e.g. that nice search box (which is the one thing you couldn't have done in 1994) still takes 3+ seconds to load and render the new page on a well-peered gigabit connection.
1. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/180628_CF_db268e65de67002e...
Yes the initial pageload takes time. But afterwards I can click around the site and get immediate feedback. Immediate as in native app speeds. Images and such obviously still take time to load and render but they do not block loading. There's no whitescreen while I wait for new pages to load.
So as someone with shitty internet who often browses documentation, give me hundreds of sites like this. This is significantly faster to browse around than, say, the Python or Django documentation, both of which make very little use of Javascript. I'm sorry you're not getting the same experience, I can't speak to that.
To reiterate: An SPA will bloody obviously not faster on the first pageload. The whole idea behind it is that you load more machinery upfront but you don't load it again afterwards. Depending on how good the app is, you make up for it very, very quickly. And if you have any significant JS usage on your site at all, you make up for that too.
My point, which everyone seems to have completely missed, is that well-built SPAs do exist. They don't have to feel slower to use than other apps.
It's especially true for a documentation website.
Even if I browse a little, it will be swift clicks on 3 to 4 pages to get to what I'm looking for. The enormous initial loading time is far from amortized.
Bottom line, if your site is just displaying text like a doc, a wiki, etc., making it an SPA is ridiculous.
Just use old school techs, and offer a zip for download.
Thankfully, I'm not a frontend developer. Was just toying around here and there. Maybe it was just that I sucked at simple things.
Still, for now I believe many (not all, of course) fancy SPAs are a probably a waste of otherwise productive time. There is already a browser, and it does things well. Having something that would allow for smaller documents is a good idea, of course, and some eye candy for transitions between different documents would be neat to have, but every site doing this for themselves feels just plain wrong to me.
Exceptions - e.g. for heavily API-centered systems - apply, of course. If a webpage is one of half a dozen client applications that consume the same API, then SPA could be a sane way to do it.
The core issue being that you have no way of statefully going from one page to the next. State only exists within the page you're on. Hence the rise of SPAs.
Hacker news:
- first load: 6 seconds
- next loads: 3.5 seconds
Serverless:
- first load: 26 seconds
- next loads: 7.5 seconds