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It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

jonoalderson.com

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Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#331

Post by PaulHoule »

zero_shift wrote: post #315
cleoxjefbjxis wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss the whole point and the author is correct about this: Modern CSS is powerful, and HTML is the way to deliver web content. Every web framework is _literally_ a hack to make the web something it isn’t. People who haven’t seen the evolution often pick up the bad habits as best practice. For thise JavaScript people, I recommend trying Laravel or Ruby/Rails. And then once you realize that JavaScript sucks you’ll…

Laravel is fine. It's not amazing . Like most "Modern PHP" it exhibits a Java fetish and when used carelessly can degrade into an upside-down impression of Enterprise J2EE patterns (but with an almost non-existent type system). What I find interesting though is the assumption that web dev is done by "JavaScript people", that even the best "JavaScript people" have no technical breadth, and therefore fester in a cesspo…

It’s connected with the questions around occupational licensing of programmers, unions, and similar structures which would not be so much about getting paid more but about getting quality up, squashing bullshit, and getting our quality of life up.

Without a cohesive community, mutual respect, and recognition of a shared body of knowledge, we don’t have the solidarity to make it happen.

As for Laravel, I’d say people were making complex applications (Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo) in 1999 —- Google Maps were better than Mapquest, which drew each image with a cgi-bin, but many SPA applications are form handling applications that could have been implemented with the IBM 360 and 3270 terminal.

The OG web was missing a few things. Forms were usually written on one HTML page and received by a separate cgi-script. To redraw the form in case of errors you need one script that draws the form and draws the response and a router that choose which one to draw. You need two handfuls of helper functions, for instance
to make forms which can be populated based on what’s already in your database. People never wrote down “the 15 helper functions” because they were too busy writing frameworks like Laravel and Ruby-on-Rails that did 20x more than you really needed. So the knowledge to build the form applications we were building in 1999 is lost like the knowledge of how the pyramids were built.

As for performance, web sites today really are bloated, it’s not just the ads and trackers, it’s shocking how big the of documents get when you are including three copies of the metadata. If you are just drawing a form and nothing else, it’s amazing how fast you can redraw the whole page —- if you are able to delete the junk, old school apps can be as fast as desktop apps on the LAN and still be snappy over mobile.

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#332

Post by arccy »

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.

that has nothing to do with an mpa

these days there's a "copy link" button for directions which you can save / share

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#333

Post by [deleted] »

zero_shift wrote: post #275
codingdave wrote: post #14

SPAs make sense when your users have long sessions in your app. When it is worth the pain to load a large bundle in exchange for having really small network requests after the load. Smooth transitions are a nice side effect, but not the reason for an SPA. The core argument of the article, that client-side routing is a solution for page transitions, is a complete misunderstanding of what problems SPAs solve. So absolu…

This article is full of misrepresentations and lazy takes. The author has had other anti-JS polemics widely upvoted on HN, which were just as carelessly written. But people upvote it anyway. What is the cause of this? 1. Bad experiences with JavaScript apps that have aggregated complexity (be it essential or incidental complexity)? 2. Non-JS developers mystified and irritated at a bunch of practices they've never rea…

[deleted]

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#334

Post by Capricorn2481 »

zero_shift wrote: post #315
cleoxjefbjxis wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss the whole point and the author is correct about this: Modern CSS is powerful, and HTML is the way to deliver web content. Every web framework is _literally_ a hack to make the web something it isn’t. People who haven’t seen the evolution often pick up the bad habits as best practice. For thise JavaScript people, I recommend trying Laravel or Ruby/Rails. And then once you realize that JavaScript sucks you’ll…

Laravel is fine. It's not amazing . Like most "Modern PHP" it exhibits a Java fetish and when used carelessly can degrade into an upside-down impression of Enterprise J2EE patterns (but with an almost non-existent type system). What I find interesting though is the assumption that web dev is done by "JavaScript people", that even the best "JavaScript people" have no technical breadth, and therefore fester in a cesspo…

> One thing I have observed is that in each silo, there are certain programmers who assume they are the only sane group in the industry. They aren't interested in what problems the other siloes are solving and they assume any solution "over there" they don't understand is bad / decadent / crazy

A lot of coders have realized there's social credit in trashing other programmers. I regularly see comments from people claiming to have a singular custodial spirit for their craft, unrivaled by their peers. There's obviously advantages to telling people that everyone else is holding it wrong.

Then their advice is

- Some niche trick that's completely irrelevant to most situations

- Something that sounds obvious and uncontroversial, but is so broad and vague that it's not even worth arguing about.

And I realize the irony of me making this comment. But I wish we'd get over this phase where everyone thinks they're an expert, and that every bad codebase or slow app was the result of someone who didn't care. I have yet to work with someone who didn't care about their code.

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#335

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #312
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is HN not an app? All the content is user generated. Everything is interactive. What's the difference?

Most of the time spent is content consumption (viewing html documents), rather interaction (which is only 2 simple actions).

I suppose that's valid. Feels fairly arbitrary though

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#336

Post by PaulHoule »

tanduv wrote: post #244
wolpoli wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Where are the places with low-bandwidth internet? Are we talking about cruise ships and satellites internet use cases?

TBH even in the SF Bay Area "tech capital of the world" you'll find areas with spotty reception. https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1cqhr4i/what_is_up...

Crazy hills will do wireless in anywhere. In a rural area I am maybe a mile from the tower as the neutrino flies but a photon can’t make it. I have a bar of 5G in the pasture in front of the house but in the house it promises a bar of LTE but whether I can get out a text (w/o WiFi) depends on atmospheric conditions.

Out in Cali they have ring of fire conditions.

Too much crowding can do it too. A decade ago I was going to Cali a lot and thought it was funny to see so many ads for geospatial apps on TV that always showed a map of San Francisco when for me SF was where GIS went to die. Taking my Garmin handheld to the roof of the Moscone center because it was the only place it could get a clear view of the sky to sync up with GPS, so many twisty little streets that routing algorithms would struggle…. Being guided around to closed restaurant after closed restaurant and walking past 10+ open ones because a co-worker was using Yelp, etc.

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#337

Post by PaulHoule »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #76
codingdave wrote: post #14

SPAs make sense when your users have long sessions in your app. When it is worth the pain to load a large bundle in exchange for having really small network requests after the load. Smooth transitions are a nice side effect, but not the reason for an SPA. The core argument of the article, that client-side routing is a solution for page transitions, is a complete misunderstanding of what problems SPAs solve. So absolu…

Side note, sick of jQuery being always associated with spaghetti in the tech lexicon. Any Turing-complete system is spaghetti in the hands of bad programmers. And simple & clear in the hands of good ones who know how to design.

It drives me crazy when it used together with React —- I want to have one authoritative copy of the state of my app, and jQuery bypasses that, at least if I’m using controlled forms.

Now I used to hate uncontrolled forms but now I like react-hook-form.

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#338

Post by PaulHoule »

buffalobuffalo wrote: post #26
codingdave wrote: post #14

SPAs make sense when your users have long sessions in your app. When it is worth the pain to load a large bundle in exchange for having really small network requests after the load. Smooth transitions are a nice side effect, but not the reason for an SPA. The core argument of the article, that client-side routing is a solution for page transitions, is a complete misunderstanding of what problems SPAs solve. So absolu…

I don't know if a bunch of sloppy jQuery modules were ever really a viable option for an SPA. People tried to do it, sure, but I'd say the SPA era really started with backbone.js

I wrote my first SPA, a knowledge graph editor, using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) which compiled a dialect of Java to JavaScript circa 2006 or so.

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#339

Post by PaulHoule »

throwawaylaptop wrote: post #97
dzhiurgis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never thought about scroll position (tho SPA I’ve built recently I think does it ok). How do you solve it?

I'm a self taught PHP/jQuery/bootstrap guy with a small saas. I handle page scroll position by literally saving it into some session data cookie and when you go back I check where your scroll was and I fix it for you. I'm not a genius or skilled... But I cared so I did it.

I’ve done it like that. It’s not a lot of code.

Re: It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

#340

Post by layer8 »

codingdave wrote: post #14

SPAs make sense when your users have long sessions in your app. When it is worth the pain to load a large bundle in exchange for having really small network requests after the load. Smooth transitions are a nice side effect, but not the reason for an SPA. The core argument of the article, that client-side routing is a solution for page transitions, is a complete misunderstanding of what problems SPAs solve. So absolu…

> It solved a real problem, of not wanting to reload all that code every time a user on an old browser, with a slow connection, changed some data.

Why would the browser have to reload the code (JS files) on every page transition, with proper caching headers?

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