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Interesting that you should mention device support as a cause of more complex code, as the best way to support the devices you list is generally to use LESS code.

Bare HTML is supported by pretty much everything...

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But for some reason it's not cool to use HTML. We throw on megabytes of code just to bypass the page reload so that we can better control the user experience. This is why we end up with complex and bloated libraries like React and end up with a frontend and backend state that have to be kept in sync.

I wish we went back plain HTML, especially for sites that don't need to be dynamic.

Browsers shouldn’t let you bypass reloads outside of the window unload event, and that is standardized and doesn’t leave much room to mess with. Can you elaborate if that was a real thing you are referring to?

I assume the parent is referring to the rise in popularity of single-page applications.

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