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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

At this point SPA pretty much implies React. But even if you optimize everything the best you could and avoid any third-party runtime dependencies, it's still going to be significantly more work to make API requests and do client-side rendering vs just rendering HTML server-side.

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Not always. Consider an SPA that connects via WebSockets and streams in data, adding points to a chart. The JS-less alternative would be refreshing an SVG or even the whole page once a second. The SPA is clearly more efficient here (unless someone screws it up badly).

I wouldn't consider that an SPA at all, it's just a page with an interactive element. An SPA is something that renders everything client-side and uses a generic client API to talk to the backend. A telltale sign of an SPA is that the first thing you see when you open it is some sort of loading indicator instead of the actual page you're visiting.

No, the telltale sign of a SPA is that it’s an app that’s a single fucking page, lol

Please stop changing the definitions of explicit words and phrases - to anyone reading this!

Right but the implication of a SPA is that it’s an application which has many logical pages, but only one real page. The logical pages are constructed by dynamically updating the DOM using JavaScript. As opposed to navigating to a new, server-provided page.

For example, a search function. For a MPA, each search query would be a new page. For a SPA, each query is a new logical page, served on the same real page.

Technically yes, a SPA may have minimal client side rendering. But then it’s not doing much of anything at all - it’s just a site. When people say SPA, they typically mean an application with client side rendering.

> it’s just a site

sigh

…does someone else want to finish this up?

This reply means basically nothing to me or anyone.

To expand on what I mean, if the implication isn’t obvious: a SPA with no client side rendering is just a single HTML page. It’s a document, not an application.

So SPA naturally implies client side rendering.

The difference between a SPA and MPA isn’t the amount of pages, they both have about the same amount of logic pages. It’s about where those pages are rendered. Dynamically on the front end, or on the back end.

EDIT: okay okay to expand, my website has a contact form. With JS enabled, the form submit displays a little box that says “thank you for submitting”. With JS disabled, it navigates you to a “thank you for submitting” page.

Both are the same logic page, they have the same function. One page is just rendered client side, and one server side. Most websites or applications are hybrids. There’s very few true single page applications, and very few true multi page applications. Most SPAs have multiple real pages for different things. Most MPAs combine multiple logic pages into one real page.

Single HTML files / pages can be fully-featured, full-purpose-fulfilling applications.

> Most websites or applications are hybrids.

and some are emphatically not.

But…where were you going with that?

The features of HTML are still greatly limited. You can’t really create applications with just one HTML page and no client-side rendering. You can play a video, sure, but that’s not an application. You can also do magic with CSS but that’s an experimental fun thing, not a thing people actually do.

As soon as you, say, use JS to update the DOM or a canvas, I consider that client-side rendering. That you can do, and that would be a SPA.

But I’m curious, what are some examples, even hypothetical, of applications consisting of one HTML page? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.

You can inline the following in one HTML page:

CSS (.css) JavaScript (.js) Plain Text (.txt) HTML (.html) SVG (.svg) Raster Images (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .webp, .bmp) Audio (.mp3, .wav, .ogg) Video (.mp4, .webm) JSON (.json) PDF (.pdf)

plus bring in other source resources as needed.

To answer your question:

The installer for GrapheneOS / Google Pixel phones is an “SPA” (or “webapp”).

I’ve seen bespoke fitness trackers of all kinds,

appliance control apps,

budget and pace-tracking stuff,

basically all of what computer programs used to do - before we started dynamically loading a ton of extra stuff onto the screen that nobody needed to do the task they came to do.

Right, but if you’re dynamically changing the HTML from JS, like the graphemeos website does, then that’s client-side rendering, which is my whole argument. Embedding the JS in HTML makes zero difference, it’s the same thing.

So, they are truly inseparable IMO. You can’t have a SPA without some amount of client side rendering, your example demonstrates that. So, what makes a SPA a SPA is the rendering. A SPA is “single page”, but only in literal meaning. Logically, every SPA is many pages, you just render them purely client-side.

Almost every major website you interact with daily relies heavily on client-side execution to some degree.

and none of this seems to have anything to do with the frontend being a single page.

By that definition, Smithereen, my fediverse server software, is also an SPA, since it does what I call "ajax navigation" on desktop, so that the notifications websocket doesn't get disconnected and reconnected every time you click a link. It's technically a single page that gets most of its content replaced at runtime when you click a link, after all, right?

Yes.

Could you point out where you think the gotcha is? I can taste the tone.

Just because a bunch of engineers applied implicit meaning that didn’t exist to a very literal phrase for a few years doesn’t make it correct.

Doesn’t make webapps inherently bad.

Doesn’t make SPAs bad.

> At this point SPA pretty much implies React

At this point, app pretty much implies React - ask an LLM for an app and see if that’s not what you get.

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