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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

The idea exists but it's clearly not true, except perhaps in specific, niche uses like re-rendering a continuously refreshed graph. Even for your image gallery, it makes for confusion. Back button does what? Shift-refresh does what? Just let the browser do what it does. If you want the images to render fast, use HTML 2.

Writing a web app with server side pages forces you to think about where the state lives. This is a beneficial discipline.

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Google Maps would be the classic example of client-side refresh working so well that it's now the universal choice. At the time, it was a revelation, as the Mapquest-ish predecessors (if I recall) required a click and server-side refresh to scroll or zoom the map.

Of course the revelation here was that <a> tags weren't what we needed to move a map, but rather a click-and-drag plus scroll-wheel behavior to explore a huge image at various levels of detail. If the server-side page-by-page navigation paradigm is a lousy fit for information delivered over the internet, then it may make sense to re-invent the page load.

To use the language of a sibling comment, this brought things to a much more app-ish behavior. And eventually Internet maps have become, especially on mobile devices, an app. Hence the need to break server-side navigation may have foreshadowed the need to break out of the browser.

I think this can be generalized as: if you need to break out of "click and wait a moment and see a changed screen" paradigm, for something like a continuously scrolling map or a smoothly flowing server load graph, then you can make good use of client-side loading.

If you are just trying to re-create it, don't.

Exactly. But why a blog platform or news site or other content-focused website would feel the need to do that is beyond me. Not everything on the internet needs to be an app.

The back button would do the same as it would do after you click a [next image] link :)

Not sure about your point, the history API improves UX if you do it right:

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

It does everything as hand written, pure HTML page would, just do it faster.

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