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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

#481

Post by jeremy8883 »

donatj wrote: post #234
nfw2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance, developer experience, user experience

I'm sorry but what!? Have you talked to your users? The ones that actually are forced to use your app day in and out? They want functional back buttons, they want to be able to open any action in a new tab. No one who actually uses your product would prefer an SPA once the flash wears off. Let me tell you as a developer who has been on both sides of things, developing server rendered pages and not having to worry abo…

the back button does work, if you use any basic routing library. opening in a new tab does work, with any basic routing library...

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

#482

Post by uxcolumbo »

kerkeslager wrote: post #410
zeroq wrote: post #10

SPA is not only about seamless transitions but also being able to encapsulate a lot of user journey on the client side, without the need of bothering server too much. Let me give you an example - one of my biggest gripes about web ux is the fact that in 2025 most shops still requires you to fully reload (and refetch) content when you change filters or drill down a category. A common use case is when you come to a sho…

> SPA is not only about seamless transitions but also being able to encapsulate a lot of user journey on the client side, without the need of bothering server too much. True, but as a user, I don't want you encapsulating my journey. You can wax poetic about hypothetical book categories, but the reality of SPAs is that they break back buttons, have terrible accessibility anti-patterns, attempt to control my attention,…

Why is this being downvoted.

I agree, as user make it fast and don’t break the web. I see so many SPAs with bad usability, like back button not working.

A shopping site doesn’t need to be SPA.

A drawing app, 3D modeller, collaborative whiteboard, video chat, those type of apps fit the SPA model.

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

#483

Post by mosselman »

cnasc wrote: post #398
j0rd72 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself agreeing with the article (although I also agree that it assumes you've chosen an SPA when you shouldn't have). To add my own perspective: I work on an app, the front-end of which essentially consists of 6 nav tabs, 3 of which show an index of records with corresponding add/edit forms. We don't have any hyper-fancy interactive components that would require heavy JS libraries. And yet... we develop in Re…

> We don't have any hyper-fancy interactive components that would require heavy JS libraries. And yet... we develop in React. Is React really a "heavy" library? https://bundlephobia.com/package/react@19.1.0 > The React view took me 52 minutes, plus I later found out that I'd forgotten a damn type on some interface that's a shallow copy of our model. This sounds like bad architecture, nothing about React would necessi…

Whenever someone presents an anecdote like this, there is always someone who says “but then you are doing react wrong”.

Ok, so why is it possible to do it so wrong so often then? That sounds like a downside of the tool. It is a sharp knife. That doesn’t mean there is no place for react, but it also doesn’t mean we have to wipe it under the rug and pretend like it is everybody else’s fault.

I never read a story about it taking an hour to add a field to a form in Rails and it only taking 2 minutes in react. I’ve experienced the other way around for years though. So there is some truth to it. Let’s embrace the truth and look for what react brings us despite this.

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

#484

Post by zero_shift »

threatofrain wrote: post #23

I don't know what universe this SEO-consultant author lives in. The author gives Next & Nuxt as an example of the kind of frameworks going against his prescription, but that is so wrong. 1. Next won the war in the west, big time. Very very big time. Whenever people talk about new React apps they inadvertently mean Next. On the Vue side Nuxt is the default winner, and Nuxt is just the Next of Vue. That means that by d…

> I don't know what universe this SEO-consultant author lives in.

After looking over the author's blog I can see

1. Very high output

2. Lots of AI images

3. Weird writing and editing lapses in several posts

I am moderately confident this post was written with an AI. It may not be totally AI produced, I think the author has probably edited the work, but I think we are mostly debating synthetic content.

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

#485

Post by zero_shift »

benreesman wrote: post #394
zero_shift wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know that there's "real" programming, that seems like a hard fight to fight on either side, it's like arguing about whether animals are conscious or something. Are people? Who knows, pass the blunt. But there's been this really sharp over-correction to where now an obvious thing that is just common knowledge and that was never taboo is now considered impolite to even allude to. Frontend programming is among t…

After looking over the author's blog I can see

1. Very high output

2. Lots of AI images

3. Weird writing and editing lapses in several posts

I am moderately confident this post was written with an AI. It may not be totally AI produced, I think the author has probably edited the work, but I think we are mostly debating synthetic content.

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

#486

Post by strken »

andix wrote: post #38
strken wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're using "single-page app as opposed to no or limited JS on the client" while an alternative would be "single-page app as opposed to multi-page app". There's no reason you have to implement something like Slack by reloading an iframe.

Not reloading the document via HTTP while updating the content is the definition of a SPA.

I would argue that the line between an SPA and not is blurred. Consider progressive enhancement; or, per the Slack example, pages with content that's updated dynamically but which rely on reloading a whole page for navigation.

I would even argue that passing snippets of HTML around like e.g. Hotwire is still a middle ground.

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

#487

Post by paffdragon »

nevertoolate wrote: post #442
paffdragon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so annoying when SPAs break browser functionality like open link in new tab. Even if it works often it has to reload a bunch of JS again, which makes things veeery slow. This is why I really don't like Linear, I often open issues in separate tabs, which is every time a pain, browser freezes for seconds just to open a link in a tab...

I think it was not designed for your use case. It is conveniently running in the browser but not a collection of links to html pages. The people quarreling in this comment section seemingly ignore that life is complex, web browsers are complex, web development is complex. Maybe you should think about linear as a desktop app and call it a day :)

My use case is being productive at my work. If it was not designed for that, then not sure what is it for. It comes up fairly often in team chats, it's a resource hog with ridiculously high memory usage, poor browser utility, syntax highlighting selecting random languages,... I'm happy that it fits your desktop app use case, but there are also other people that see this as a limitation and sign of poor design. Web development is complex, but acknowledging that there are poor web apps and better web apps is part of that too. And from my experience and in my opinion (also shared in my team), Linear is an example of the bloated web app that is making the web worse for us, which is why I brought it up above.

EDIT: the parent I was replying to talked about the issue of opening links in new tabs and your answer - don't do it, use it like a desktop app - is basically the problem we are having with some of these web apps.

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

#489

Post by cnasc »

mosselman wrote: post #483
cnasc wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't have any hyper-fancy interactive components that would require heavy JS libraries. And yet... we develop in React. Is React really a "heavy" library? https://bundlephobia.com/package/react@19.1.0 > The React view took me 52 minutes, plus I later found out that I'd forgotten a damn type on some interface that's a shallow copy of our model. This sounds like bad architecture, nothing about React would necessi…

Whenever someone presents an anecdote like this, there is always someone who says “but then you are doing react wrong”. Ok, so why is it possible to do it so wrong so often then? That sounds like a downside of the tool. It is a sharp knife. That doesn’t mean there is no place for react, but it also doesn’t mean we have to wipe it under the rug and pretend like it is everybody else’s fault. I never read a story about…

> “but then you are doing react wrong”

My objection is not that they are doing React wrong, it’s that their complaint is incoherent because there is literally nothing about React that could make this task take an hour. React isn’t a form library. You write the markup for an html input element, if it’s a controlled input you have a trivial one-line change event handler, and you have a submit event handler. Any additional complexity here isn’t coming from React, and managing to overcomplicate such a basic thing and misidentify the source of the complexity absolutely speaks to a skill issue.

This is especially funny in a thread where posters hold up Rails as a paragon of quality and efficiency.

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

#490

Post by [deleted] »

zero_shift wrote: post #484
threatofrain wrote: post #23

I don't know what universe this SEO-consultant author lives in. The author gives Next & Nuxt as an example of the kind of frameworks going against his prescription, but that is so wrong. 1. Next won the war in the west, big time. Very very big time. Whenever people talk about new React apps they inadvertently mean Next. On the Vue side Nuxt is the default winner, and Nuxt is just the Next of Vue. That means that by d…

> I don't know what universe this SEO-consultant author lives in. After looking over the author's blog I can see 1. Very high output 2. Lots of AI images 3. Weird writing and editing lapses in several posts I am moderately confident this post was written with an AI. It may not be totally AI produced, I think the author has probably edited the work, but I think we are mostly debating synthetic content.

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