The counterargument: In Defence of the Single Page Application: https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defenc...
I have to say that I hate SPAs. It is often a far worse user experience than the vanilla multi-page websites.
Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
131–140 of 605 posts
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#132Old people. They exist.
Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works.
You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from there. Maybe you should have clicked something before? Maybe you should mark some form checkbox?
Old people don't have that because they didn't grow up with computers.
What is on the screen is what they see. I clicked next and nothing happens. Well... the site is broken.
You known when you plug your refrigerator and nothing happens and instead of reflecting on the possible blown out resistor that you can bypass with a small wire you understand that your only relationship with the refrigerator is plug and unplug or call for help? That is an old person using your site. They won't fight against it. They'll give up immediately.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#133Excellent article but I am always torn when I read inspirational articles like this - it makes perfect sense to me and I love the idea of simple, non-nonsense sites that work well, load quickly and don't rely on the latest browsers to function. Then I start to wonder if that's just because I'm not smart enough to understand React or whatever the fancy technology of the day is. Feels like I have a hard understanding t…
If it makes you feel any better, the people using the fancy frameworks and whatnot usually aren't smart enough to understand them either.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#134I am not familiar with this astro framework they used. But having built some sites using Pure HTML/JS back in the day, React, Angular, Vue, Rails ERB, Rails Hotwire, and HTMX. I think HTML first websites are absolutely the way to go. Rails Hotwire with View Components makes rails sites super fast, faster to develop and easy to re-use components. HTMX more generally, but Ive used it with Spring boot and Thymeleaf. I r…
I first tested Astro on my site and never went back. Now every new project defaults to Astro and I have to have a reason not to use it. So far no reasons. It's simple, fast and it kinda fits my desire to keep things minimal. For example, yes, page content matters, but all but one page on my site is under 10kb, most hovering in the 3-4kb range (100% of the downloadable content)
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder why there isn't a mobile OS that simply lets you build apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and gives you reliable storage without all this effort. There is! You just have to time travel all the way back to 2009 when webOS was launched by Palm. Time travel is the easy part, you then also need to somehow prevent Palms demise and webOS fading into obscurity as a smartphone OS. If 2009 is too far back you can…
Maybe I'm missing something but aren't PWAs pretty dead-simple on both iOS and Android? Maybe it's the "reliable storage" part that's the gap?
The amount of effort that goes into keeping Termux barely functional, has a lot to do with Android and the platform making it harder and harder, to access a dev environment on a phone.
Running `npm install` on Android isn't so easy.
(Caveat: The new Android Terminal that only works on a handful of models.)
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
explain?
"Chai" means "tea", so "Chai Tea" is "Tea Tea". "ATM" means "Automatic Teller Machine", so "ATM Machine" is "Automatic Teller Machine Machine". Both are mentioned in the animated movie "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse".
Actually, in English, Chai does not mean tea, it means a specific flavor of tea. If you don't believe me, try ordering some Earl Grey Chai, see what happens.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#137Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…
Giving up is a wise choice: there are so many other sites to interact with. On the other side they have only one refrigerator.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#138This isn't "We replaced a React app with an HTML form and performance improved." It's "We replaced a bad web page with a good web page and performance improved."
Attributing this to the technology driving the browser experience is silly. You can make a brilliant user experience with React. You can make a terrible website with plain HTML.
The improvement comes from the change design, not tech.
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#139Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…
There's a great book that explains how abstract computer systems have become from the machinery: https://dabacon.org/caelifera/2017/02/05/book-overcomplicate...
Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
#140The quote from Terence Eden almost made me cry. Actually the whole article did.