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Comment by holofernes | Hacker News Reader

Finally some love for the anti-SPA crowd. Subjective here, but there's something nice about Post Redirect Get and Plain Ol' Hyperlinks from a User Experience. Whenever I interact with a regular web application, I am relieved. Not every "forms over data" or ecommerce experience has to be Gmail. Even in mobile.. SPA just isn't that much nicer. Also, I think maintaining these SPAs is ridiculously more difficult.

I don't think the SPA juice is worth the squeeze.

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From a development standpoint there are a lot of things I prefer from the old Post Redirect Get workflow. The biggest thing I don't miss is modeling complex data in a form. SPAs let me sidestep this because it's JSON, which is much richer for modeling data than a plain form, going both ways. If form JSON (https://darobin.github.io/formic/specs/json/) was widespread I'd probably drop almost all my SPA usage immediately.

That is a good point. The hard part of programming is the modeling. And your point leads to another, easy modeling is why JSON as a format (and its programming interface, JavaScript) is so appealing. I guess it's a trade off: complex modeling and state transfer vs. sometimes inscrutable magic asset loading, client/server programming model, losing the natural behavior of the web, and all the other criticisms in the article and elsewhere.

Funnily enough, even for GMail I use their "legacy" HTML+URLs+POST requests interface. It's honestly a breath of fresh air (although the styling is a bit dated).

But it's lovely to be able to open multiple compose windows in new tabs by just middle-clicking the "Compose Mail" link. Then again, I realise the more explicit workflow is a matter of preference (eg it won't autosave drafts unless you hit "Save draft", and I like that, but others might not).

Agree. The few SPA sites I use annoy the heck out of me. garmin connect is one that I use, and when I view an activity and want to go back, I need to wait .5 or 1 second as the page loads. Sure, I have a nice empty list to look at as it loads, which just annoys me more. I don't know if this is a fault of SPAs, or just poor app design because there seems to be no caching. The delay is just log enough to annoy me.

Having had experience with both, I'm a lot happier implementing Ajax form submissions than POST-redirect-GET. Sometimes a form submission has a lot of state around it. Sometimes its result has a major effect on the state of the application of which it's a part. Sometimes you end up implementing half of the ideas involved in the SPA architecture, badly, a couple of years before it becomes a "thing" in the web dev community at large, because that's the only way to produce a halfway decent UX for your tens of thousands of users, and you know this because you've tried all the ways that revolve around POST-redirect-GET and none of them has worked well enough to be going on with.

Of course you're welcome to be as anti-SPA as you please. But those of us who've welcomed the concept with all the fervor of a relieved garrison generally have our reasons for so doing.

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