Hacker News Reader

Comment by hawski | Hacker News Reader

I hoped that designers learned something and decided to stop the war against their users. I did not hold my breath.

To clarify I have nothing against actual web applications like an image editor or a game. However a wiki (I don't appreciate Notion), an online shop or a damned blog should not be one. I want my history, link copying, bookmarking, middle-clicks and Ctrl/Cmd-clicks to work as intended.

View on HN

They work perfectly fine under a SPA. SPA pushes history which lets the back button work and you can bookmark the URls. They have real URLs so you can create tabs.

Go look at https://www.target.com/ and see if you can tell difference between SPA and regular web page except for the speed aspect.

If you have a history with multiple pages each with their own URI then it is not a SPA. SPA means "single page application".

That's not true. Wikipedia [0] has a nice summary:

> A single-page application (SPA) is a web application or website that interacts with the user by dynamically rewriting the current web page with new data from the web server, instead of the default method of the browser loading entire new pages. The goal is faster transitions that make the website feel more like a native app.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application

You’re getting a downvote treatment but I kinda agree with you that SPA shouldn’t change history. But also, that was like the first versions of SPAs. The name stuck around (hello AJAX) while the underlying infrastructure and mechanisms great improved.

"Page" is clearly too ambiguous as almost any acronym will be. The main tenet of a Single Page Application at least used to be, before it was buzzworded into ambiguity, that the browser loads everything it needs once and makes round trips only for new data or incremental functionality. I think the same definition is still applicable, though. It never had anything to do with the information architecture of your UI or whether the majority of the screen might change between pages. And nothing to do with the URL or history; that's all orthogonal and now can and should be done with deep linking and the history API to allow people to have faster feedback and still interact with sites in the browser the way they always have.

Single page load is the definition. The page never reloads. Even the first SPAs would uses url hashes to change the url before pushState was adopted.

Long ago Ruby on rails had a feature that sort of cached all links on the current page to make navigating to them faster. What happened to that? Would that not provide the same speed benefit? I'm ignoring the inefficient use of data here, ofc.

It's still a thing: https://turbo.hotwire.dev/

HTML fragments are not all that less efficient than JSON on the wire, and they are much more CPU efficient for low-powered client devices.

I think you're referring to TurboLinks. TurboLinks is still around. Building on that technology and moving towards HTML over socket is https://hotwire.dev/

That would be TurboLinks. It's going strong, and has seen significant improvements over time. Especially when paired with something like Stimulus and/or Reflex and/or Hotwire, you can make some _very_ snappy feeling server-side rendered HTML. At this point, I won't even consider making SPAs for anything unless the product owner has an incredibly compelling reason.

If you're curious what the modern state of server-side HTML Rails can be from the user's perspective, head over to hey.com and sign up for their free trial.

Isn't it so relieving now that the pendulum is swinging back?

I'm so glad I moved into C# and non-web dev/management and got out of that rat race. Tech always swings back and forth, but I'm so very happy to have made it past SPAs being the end all be all.

> I want my history, link copying, bookmarking, middle-clicks and Ctrl/Cmd-clicks to work as intended.

In a well designed SPA, these will all work.

It's like with C or C++. Most people that do write it shouldn't, because they are not good enough or the process is broken and they will shoot their leg. SPAs are the same way, because you have to implement all those normal website things again by yourself. There will be casualties.

Exactly, the problem is that you don’t get these baseline features for free. SPA, in my experience, is a lot of people poorly reimplementing the wheel.

> I want my history, link copying, bookmarking, middle-clicks and Ctrl/Cmd-clicks to work as intended.

Solutions for all of those for SPAs have been around for quite a while. Whether any particular SPA uses them or not is, of course, variable, but there is nothing inherent to SPAs that prevents them from working.

In fact, in every modern JavaScript framework or rendering library I'm aware of, you have to go out of your way to make links that don't work with middle-click or page navigations that don't work with history and bookmarks.

I should start noting all those bugs, because I see them almost every day. But to be honest even "regular" web sites are guilty, especially with ctrl/cmd-click.

I want all those things too, but not clear on how you think notion should be implemented.

I use it exclusively in the browser on a laptop. I find it slow but I do not think that is the fault of browser tech or SPA architecture, and I assume it will get addressed.

>and decided to stop the war against their users The thing is that the question is who are their actual users? Truth is just that we arent the actual users, by we I mean the tech savvy crowd we are a minorityand form what I have seen the majority of the users of notion are happier with they way it has evolved, and at the end of the day notion and places like it are going to follow that, I dont like it but this is usually what the war against their "users" is a byproduct of.

Every single day I see my wife and relatives struggle with modern computing. Not to say that previously it was much better, but web applications are increasingly different between each other in the way they work. They are not tech savvy, but are bitten in the ass by everything that computers have to offer, especially web pages. I am angry, because I know how it can all work better or see bunch of bugs in almost anything I use, but I can form quite easily workarounds, they can't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com