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Comment by zelly | Hacker News Reader

I find craigslist's fast loading pages to be problematic.

I think their website would be improved by rewriting it entirely in JavaScript, transpiling the JavaScript to JavaScript, requiring the JavaScript to render, re-implementing the entire UI in JavaScript including hyperlinks, then running JavaScript on the server to generate HTML, sending the HTML to the browser, also sending the JavaScript bundle with megabytes of hipster fonts and random people's github repos to insert spaces in a string and stuff, then finally re-rendering the client's page after the multi-megabyte JavaScript bundle finishes downloading.

Now that is the nice modern user experience I have come to demand as a user in 2019.

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Don’t forget breaking the back button miserably and ensuring there are no URL’s that can be copied and pasted.

Also to spam about using cookies and ask for the location data every single time you visit.

Ah the ultimate Single Page Abomination (as I jokingly call it even though I do my own at work but everything has its place).

Course Svelte is what might be the game changer in this regard.

You forgot notification permissions.

I really wish I could tell the browser to default those to "Nope" for me.

I'm sure you can, at least on Safari. The default is "ask" but you can change it to "deny". I'd be surprised if other browsers don't allow this.

You can in Chrome and Firefox, it's buried in the config setting though.

> ensuring there are no URL’s that can be copied and pasted

Google maps does this with addresses. Why can't they just let someone copy the text. I don't understand why it's so purposefully hostile to users.

Don't forget browser compatibility IE10 and up with an extra 10mb of polyfills...

It saddens me that people learn to write "Hello World" on a website after downloading 1200 packages from npm...

If a site feels unusable like this it's because you're the not the user. News sites, for example, are SPAs because they want to sell you ads. It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the business using it.

You can still do ads (and they have been done for decades) without SPAs. In fact SPAs would reduce the efficiency of the ad tracking as the ad JS is now competing for resources with the SPA JS.

The point is if their goal was to just serve news or articles the site would be just thin layer over a CDN serving raw HTML. In order to serve and track dynamic advertisements they build sites with MBs of JavaScript instead.

How are SPA-s and displaying ads related? The reload / page model benefits news sites more since they can generate more pageviews and hence ad reloads. There really is no connections. Devs implement SPA-s because they think it's better user experience (yes, it's hard to get it right).

I doubt anyone relying on ad revenue to run a business equates pageviews with HTTP requests to the server anymore.

Which news sites are SPA's? I haven't seen that. Most are usable without javsacript, though the experience is diminished and some have such harsh lazy-loading that the images are all invisible. And menus/search may be broken. I've never had a problem with navigation, though.

I feel personally attacked

Reading that stressed me out so much.

I came for this and was not disappointed. Please continue.

You mean Magento??

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