i lived thru that era.
how were they fast on 56kbps modem connections? i clearly remember having to leave my pc on all night to download a single mp3. for websites i would usually grab a book and read a few pages while the site loaded.
Few third party js files
Optimized images
And the fact the site had to actually open on 56k modems
Pages were better before this modern SPA thing that ironically get sold in to improve user experience.
End of discussion I guess..?
Now that I see what things like Angular can do, with lazy-loaded components, and only downloading JSON data and letting the client render the DOM, my pages are actually much faster and the UX is vastly better.
Yes, you need to download the Angular libs, but so many pages use them now they are likely cached, and are negligible in size for a fast connection.
After that, it's client-side routing and downloading mostly just downloading JSON from a REST API. You don't need to server to push a 5,000 row table with all the mark-up, you just grab that data and have the browser construct your table.
And yes, you can still copy/paste the URL. And save the page as HTML. And everything else you can do with a "non-SPA" page.
YMMV.
And no doubt you can do amazing things with it.
But just because I and you can make good pages with it doesn't mean that everyone should do it.
Also, in my experience I guess it will typically
- more than doubles the cost (and I guess this is a conservative number)
- can easily introduce unnecessary problems that prevents cross-browser compatibility
- can often introduce security issues that many developers are unaware of
etc.
Then again maybe I should just let the SPA projects keep on coming: I am a consultant.