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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

For a company I worked for, we tested client side navigation and non-client (traditional) navigation for the admin interface. And then we asked the admins who use the site in question: all of them loved the client side navigation.

So you see, I suspect most users are not like the HN crowd and don't really care about command-click or the back button.

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I've got a customer with a complex UI where a lot of things happen. Basically a desktop application in a browser. We built a SPA for that.

Then there are the AWS and Google consoles where nearly every click loads a new page and I don't complain, because it's ok. And Amazon, the shopping site. Every click into a product loads a new page. They seem to be doing pretty well.

I would build SPAs where it's difficult to give a different URL to what's on screen after every click. Server side rendering in every other case.

Not every project is the same. I suspect there are many applications where an SPA is a much better experience than a traditional website. In my opinion, a documentation site is not one of them.

Its also really not that hard to make cmd click + back button to work properly with client side nav.

Can you support iOS's "peek" menu as well?

Yes, I tried it just now on a random website I built in Vue. Any sane implementation of client-side navigation uses the History API[1]. It is indistinguishable from "real" navigation in the browser UI, apart from how fast it is.

If on the other hand, if you encounter code like the abomination below (which breaks cmd+click, peek and forward/back), you should not (imo) conflate it with actual client-side navigation. I suspect that's what some comments here are referring to.

    <a href="#" onclick="loadContentIntoPane('contact')">Contact Us</a>

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API

Is there anything special needed to support that? I’m pretty sure you just need an <a> tag with an href. With any SPA framework/library I’m aware of, you have to go out of your way to make it not work.

But you can support both with client side navigation

I certainly can. It was just not necessary because the people who are using the site didn't care.

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