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Comment by SanderNL | Hacker News Reader

> Just the TCP handshake packets themselves (3 * 1460) can hold almost as much data as it takes to get a standard SPA.

I have no idea in what reality you live where you encounter SPAs of a few Kbs. Don’t even know what to say if that’s your experience.

> That said the problem with rants like GP's comment is that they don't serve to illuminate but serve to push on us, the readers, the author's agitated emotional state.

You are absolutely right there. I will try to refrain from these “frustration posts” in the future. Sorry about that.

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> I have no idea in what reality you live where you encounter SPAs of a few Kbs. Don’t even know what to say if that’s your experience.

Let's look at a SPA version of HN [1] and compare it against base HN. This base SPA page fetches 21 KiB of data. The base version of HN fetches 36 KiB of data. Most SPAs are much less information dense and have a lot more CSS and media than non-SPA websites. In a world without SPAs these sites would not be leaner, they would instead just insert tons of CSS style links and img tags to fetch the media themselves, resulting in the same amount of bandwidth.

If your argument is that websites should be leaner regardless, well in my experience most users would rather put up with a slow good-looking page than a fast spartan one. It's a hallmark of a nerd that's willing to cut corners just to get access to the information they want.

[1]: https://hn.premii.com/

Although HN is a very bad example of an “average” anything, it’s still a good catch. Thanks for reminding me. SPAs can definitely be leaner than regular websites. Never disagreed on that one to be honest. SPA or not is just a delivery method. Clean SPA or clean “regular” site, it’s all good.

Again I was just venting and that sucks. Yelling at the cloud(s).

To be honest, I share your aesthetic principles, but other than the other nerds in my life nobody else does shrug. I remember the '90s pop-up hell and hated that too. I just spend my time on the net in places that I enjoy.

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