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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

I agree but one important point to consider is the dev effort of making a proper SPA which is not a very common occurrence.

"The best SPA is better than the best MPA. The average SPA is worse than the average MPA."

https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/27/spas-theory-versus-practi...

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Can we even weight that statement? The average SPA is significantly worse than the average MPA. There is so much browser functionality that needs to be replicated in a SPA that few teams have the resources or talent to do a decent job.

Yeah it's so easy to fuck it all up with an SPA.

Recently I was using Circle (like a paid social media platform for communities) and pressing back not only loses the scroll position, it loses everything. It basically reloads the whole home page.

The nice thing about htmx is it gives a middle ground between the two. Build with the simplicity of an MPA while getting a lot of the nice user experience of an SPA. Sure, you don't get all the power of having a full data model on the client side, but you really don't need that for most use cases.

OTOH if you need to go back to the server after every interaction the UX can get pretty bad for distant users.

Extend that statement with "Only True Web Gods can create the Best SPA".

You joke but even Google with all its resources struggles to create proper SPAs.

I dread using the Google Cloud console for example.

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