It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

Post by heisenbit » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 6:52 AM UTC

throw-the-towel wrote: post #132

TimTheTinker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low-bandwidth/spotty connections (combined with aggressive caching) are one of the strongest cases in favor of SPAs (emphasis on the A for Application, not website). Visit (and cache) the entire frontend for the app when you have a good-enough connection, then further use of the app can proceed with minimal bandwidth usage.

This is not true. In practice SPAs break completely when some network request fails which happens a lot on bad connections.

Post by tanduv » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

danielscrubs wrote: post #220

cheema33 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...if you shared that misunderstanding of SPAs and used them to solve the wrong problem, this article is 100% correct. Agreed. The article was a frustrating read. The author is an SEO consultant. SEO consultants likely have a heavy focus on marketing websites. Actual apps and not marketing websites do benefit significantly from SPA. Imagine building Google Maps without SPA. You can animate page transitions all you…

I 100% would like to see an MPA Google Maps. Being able to come back to a webpage with previous directions? I think it would be glorious.

Post by rhet0rica » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 7:08 AM UTC

nektro wrote: post #213

might wanna consider redesigning your site, it looks like AI spam

Post by 9dev » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 7:19 AM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #7

This article would benefit from an example page to show how these "feel".

  document.startViewTransition(() => {
    document.documentElement.dataset.colorMode = 'dark' // 'light'
  });

Post by niutech » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 7:32 AM UTC

jaredklewis wrote: post #240

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends. There’s a lot of SPAs which are practically unusable on a bad connection simply because it’s a challenge to even get the whole thing loaded in the first place. There’s been several occasions where I’ve had poor cell connectivity and a huge chunk of the web was effectively off limits due to this. So in addition to aggressive caching, I’d say keeping the app’s file size down is also pretty important…

I work on an SPA with hundreds of screens. We package it using off the shelf tooling with barely any configuration. All of the code and styling is still far under a megabyte gzipped. So unless it is an all text app, the size of the code bundle is probably going to be quickly dwarfed by the size of media like images, animated images, or videos. If a site has an SPA with a, say, 3mb code bundle, I think in most cases,…