Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? – Transitional Apps with Rich Harris | Hacker News Reader

Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? – Transitional Apps with Rich Harris

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33 pointskevinak6 comments

I wouldn't say they have ruined the web, but they are often tone deaf to the context of the web. They often don't serve the same roles as a traditional website does and as a consumable document they are often closed and rigid.

I think they are often tonedeaf to how bad their UX can be as well. Contless SPAs feel like they were developed expecting zero network latency, and so they end up performing incredibly poorly in the real world, jiggling around, stuck in intermediate states, it gets very frustrating. To say nothing of their raw performance issues.

The current state of SPAs is just a symptom of an overall illness the web is suffering from. SPAs just happen to introduce some annoyances that lazy and inexperienced programmers don't avoid, often defeating the point of SPAs.

The average SPA is not only written to experience zero latency but are poorly written from an efficiency perspective. They are often doing tons of procedures under the hood in order to support generalized programming when in actuality they could get by with a lot less framework code (Svelte in part demonstrates this in a positive way). Programmers waste so much time figuring put frameworks that they shirk proper exception handling, handing off complex tasks to the server, or giving the user cues as to what to expect.

Most SPAs don't even need to be SPAs. If all the meaningful state belongs on a server then the app is better off being a traditional web site with progressive JavaScript enhancement. Not only does that free frontend code to be more UI centric but it also means JavaScript wouldn't be required. It amazes me how many blog sites don't work at all with JS turned off. That shouldn't be any more acceptable than it would have been to implement a blog entirely in Flash back in 2005.

[For SPA] 'you will need a JS framework'

Incorrect.

It has been and can be done without JavaScript as well - with frames, it wasn't because of some z-index problem (so you needed JS to rewrite from hidden iframe) then XMLHttpRequest happened, isn't because lack of knowledge how to properly use them.

> [For SPA] 'you will need a JS framework'

> Incorrect.

How to say "I haven't listened to the talk" without saying "I havent' listened to the talk".

The accompanying commentary to that slide is "Here's a non-exhaustive list of thing people will tell you are terrible about SPA: You will need to load a bloated JS framework. It's always bloated, of course."

And then he goes on to explore the validity of these claims ("They are largely valid").

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Svelte is already the perfect language / framework for me… but I am really looking forward to added support for partial hydration. Although… the code generated by the Svelte compiler is so unbelievably small and fast that any additional optimization from partial hydration will likely be highly negligible.

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