IF you want the page to be interactive without refreshes though, you gotta do something. Unless you are advocating a completely pre-ajax web.
[0] https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view
[2] https://laravel-livewire.com/
[3] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...
Look at how HN handles it when you upvote/unvote a comment.
Look at how old.reddit.com handles it when you click "load more comments" in a long thread.
Like you said, AJAX isnt limited to XML, and is really just referring to any use of XMLHttpRequest to hotload data whether its XML, JSON etc.
I wasnt asking what ajax was. I was asking if it falls into the definition of "fancy."
I think my parent proved the opposite point they meant to. old reddit and hn and wp ARE the fancy html over wire sites, and airbnb and reddit are NOT the fancy over wire sites.
How?
You can see votes appear on your network tab under the image tab instead of Fetch/XHR, even though their response return type is text/html -- interesting little hack, although I'm not quite sure why it's done this way instead of fetching since it already requires JS.
(Although modern sites that try to sweep latency under the rug by immediately updating the state on the client side and later reverting the change when the server responds are perhaps more annoying.)
That's thanks to a fantastic browser feature that was introduced a few years ago that hardly anyone knows about: Paint Holding - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/paint-holding/
"... where the browser waits briefly before starting to paint, especially if the page is fast enough. This ensures that the page renders as a whole delivering a truly instant experience."
This is why you don't see flashes of a blank white page while a new page is loading on most sites these days.
What is/was painful was, as an example, the first versions of ASP .Net Web Forms, where every client action was a full server round-trip... Server-rendered Blazor over the wire (not local or in-office server) is roughly as painful by today's standards.
I do think that it's a mix... start with basic html and enhance, or start with a component toolkit with client rendering, and inject server donut or other pre-rendering. With Cloudflare and Deno, I think the latter definitely has some traction.
This would definitely be a bad user experience.
But it doesn't mean refreshes are bad, just that the architect of that application hasn't factored them into the user experience appropriately, or they've made their interface unnecessarily complex.
All modern browsers have enough tools baked in that we can work around this without reinventing the execution and rendering pipeline (e.g. localStorage).