It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

I swear if I see another "SEO" guy or some rando web dev who joined the workforce after Covid complaining about SPAs by misrepresenting it, I'm gonna explode.

As someone who's been developing web apps since the 2000s, let me tell you the origin of SPA has few things to do with the "false promise of SPAs" he listed, but largely due to companies in the late 2000/early 2010s wanting to go "mobile first". This usually meant they still had a desktop second somewhere, which implied they were architecting the entire system to completely separate the frontends and the backend.

Before, what web devs meant by frontend was essentially server-side rendered HTML templates with perhaps a little bit of jQuery running on the client-side. Now, since mobile and desktop web apps are to share some business logic and the database somehow, people had to rediscover REST by reading Roy Fielding's Phd dissertation that inspired the original HTTP. This meant now every company was moving to service-oriented architecture and started exposing their backend APIs onto the open internet so their mobile apps and SPAs running in the browser can share the same APIs. This was a cost saving measure.

This period also coincided with the steady decline of full-stack webapp frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django because for a couple of years, these frameworks had no good ways to support an API only applications. Django hadn't even reached 1.0 back then. This was a time when NodeJS was really starting to pick up momentum. Once people had started being more comfortable with JS on the server-side, lots of people suddenly realized they could push a lot of business logic to increasing powerful desktop browsers and phones, application hosts people now call "edge devices".

This is the true impetus of SPA. How is CSS going to kill this need?

It's funny you've mentioned that.

It reminded me of the time when I joined Wikia (now Fandom) back in, I think it was 2006. One of the first things that landed on my desk was (I can't recall the context) deeplinking.

And I remember being completely flabergasted, as I came Flash/games background, and for us that problem was completely solved for at least 4 years at the time (asual swfaddress package). I felt kind of stupid having to introduce that concept to much more senior engineers that I was at the time.

You mean a chat cliënt? That seems a good worse case scenario.

If you limit history to the most recent message (and have an link to the archive at the top) you could simply reload the entire page on some interval that declines with message frequency (and when you submit the form)

Since the html document is pretty much empty the reload happens so fast you won't see the flashing. With transitions it would be perfectly smooth.

With modern css you can put the elements out of order. You can simply append the new line to the end of the html document that represents the channel. (And to the archive) Purging a few old lines can be done less frequently.

I haven't tried it but it should work just fine. I will have to build it.

Initial load will be 100x faster. The page reloads will be larger but also insanely robust.

>You mean a chat cliënt? That seems a good worse case scenario.

No, I mean discord. An application where you can chat, recieve phone calls and watch a live stream all at the same time.

A pure html chat client is uninteresting - there have been realtime html chat clients since I was teenager, even before the release of jquery.

You claimed "every SPA" app, now its down to "most". I'm not going to argue against the fact that some people have hammers and only see nails.

Every popular technology has been over implemented - these same enterprises probably have a 100-node Spark cluster to process 1GiB of data.