Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files

Why are they consistently slower than especially when there is low bandwidth or bad reception (lost packets)? Your large JS script has to be downloaded and parsed by the browser. This is fine when you have high bandwidth and low package loss. But if the opposite is true that initial hit to get all your JS code can be really painful. Writing really fast JS is hard and is not normally something that can be done in a framework. I know React is better than things like Angular, but there is nothing faster than vanilla JS.

I write a lot of pure JS and I write stuff to be very fast. However it requires more effort and a higher skill bar (to the point where I am weaker at server side development and terrible with databases).

A lot of SPAs can be replaced with with a post back mechanism and some caching of assets (CSS etc) and a sprinkling of Ajax. The less you have to download, parse etc can really make things less painful when you are in that situation.

The problem is that many developers don't bother to learn JavaScript properly so unless you give them a framework like Angular or similar you end up with the jQuery spagetti of the past.

> Says who? I understand that the underlying structures of the web are all about transferring documents and other resources. But Gmail showed us that web 'apps' are useful. Why shouldn't we pursue that? Just because the original web architecture didn't account for it?

Documents and other resources are content. It is about displaying content in a meaningful manner to the user.

If it is something that the browser can't render (word docs for example) you need to deal with that appropriately.

Sometimes a plain page with some links to download your files is more than sufficient. I used the old gmail lite version for years because it was faster and did most of the same things. If you gave that interface some nicer CSS most people probably couldn't tell that it was quite old (if done right).

> Why shouldn't we pursue that? Just because the original web architecture didn't account for it?

Generally the browser already knows how to deal with HTTP and the OS knows how to deal with documents you download (if it has the right programs installed). So I think generally things just end up better when you try to keep as things were intended to be built.

I do however have the attitude of "the water takes the shape of the container" attitude to development. Whereas others don't.

PS4 feels like they've taken webtech all over the OS interface. Its store's snappier than the 3 but the rest of the interface performs way worse. Usable, but far less pleasant.

[EDIT] store should be snappier than the 3, mind, since it's way more powerful hardware—it's still kinda slow, considering.

I've had a great experience with it recently developing a smart tv app - which are dog slow even with a quad core ARM CPU due to the resolution so I decided to learn Svelte for the project. The big downside is another templating language to learn and as you said, the community is tiny, but the surface area is small enough that it hasn't been a problem regarding tooling or debugging. Pulling in other frameworks into a svelte app is also relatively easy so it can be part of a slow incremental rewrite, although as always it devolves into a webpack/rollup config mess.