Hacker News Reader

Only for some class of websites with limited interactivity.

On iOS/Android, before all the WebKit apps took over, many apps would use a local SQLite database to support offline edits and implement a syncing protocol to the server. It's a lot of work, but the end product can be quite handy. (This is how you'd expect your email client to work, for example.)

View on HN

One could also argue, this class of websites is what the majority of the website/webapp landscape should be.

An average SPA is, in the end, a website for most users. Take a payment form for instance - we had those 10, 20, 30 years ago, with 0.1x the effort.

Of course there's place for fat client tech, but there are 1000 websites for each 'email client' - exceptional cases often dominate the discussion.

"Limited interactivity" is misleading. It allows much broader interactivity than you think, and arguably most sites and apps would work just fine in this context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com