11–20 of 328 posts
Loading a new page feels like browsing the internet.
Single Page apps feel like a native app on your phone.
At least that's what I think the reasoning behind the decision to go client side rendering is.
I think a good example of a site that makes good use of this sort of thing is Wikipedia (the non-mobile version). I love that I can mouse over links and get more information on something, without having to click to its actual page. It pulls down only the information needed, and leaves everything else in place. This makes browsing far more efficient, at least for me. Even on a fast computer with a fast connection, going to a whole new page is jarring, comparatively. Obviously if you need more information than the summary provides, great, go to the new page. But if not, this works great.
Maybe what Wikipedia does isn't what the article is complaining about. But at least I think the article should mention that "page" is not the only meaningful unit of information on the web, or at least it doesn't have to be.
If you are thinking of things as "pages", this is of course true. I think a good example of a site that makes good use of this sort of thing is Wikipedia (the non-mobile version). I love that I can mouse over links and get more information on something, without having to click to its actual page. It pulls down only the information needed, and leaves everything else in place. This makes browsing far more efficient, at…
I don't get client side navigation. It's a worse experience in every way. It's slow, often doesn't support things like command-click, it usually breaks the back button, and even if it doesn't it breaks the restoration of the scroll position. The only thing worse is a custom scroll UI. Why do people try to reinvent the most basic features of a webbrowser? And if they do, why do they always only do a half-assed job at…
Slow? I'm quite sure the whole point of client side apps is for them to be substantially faster - and most are.
Page losing is dominated by two things:
* the network. Browsers are written knowing that networking is terrible, so aggressively optimize their use of any data, including starting layout, rendering, and even JS before the page has completed loading. That’s not possible for client JS that is using XML and JSON data as neither will parse until the data is complete (this is part of why XHTML was so appallingly slow and fragile).
* JS execution - people love shoe horning JS into early page rendering. If you care about your page performance the first thing to do after networking is pushed all JS out of the path-to-initial-render. By design “client side” navigation blocks all content rendering on executing JS to build out the html/dom that a browser is much faster handling directly.
As a side benefit to making your site faster by not manually reimplementing things the browser already does for you and does better, you all get better back/forward, correct interaction with the UI, work correctly with any accessibility features that are operating, correct scrolling behavior, correct key handlers, ...
The benefit of client side rendering is you get to say you spent a lot of time doing something that already worked.
If you are thinking of things as "pages", this is of course true. I think a good example of a site that makes good use of this sort of thing is Wikipedia (the non-mobile version). I love that I can mouse over links and get more information on something, without having to click to its actual page. It pulls down only the information needed, and leaves everything else in place. This makes browsing far more efficient, at…
Most navigation on Wikipedia is plain old browsers loading HTML pages, but if you happen to support JavaScript, it's used to augment the page to make it a little easier to browse.
(I don't actually know for sure whether Wikipedia pages are primarily server rendered, but what you describe is perfectly possible using progressive enhancement).
For that matter, why does anyone engage in this constant race to the bottom? If more web authors and developers were to make a stand for decency and refuse to implement these unnecessary hacks, the Web might be a better place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slow? I'm quite sure the whole point of client side apps is for them to be substantially faster - and most are.
Did you read the article?
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but did they do this test on a 128 kilobit cellular Internet connection?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article?
I read the article. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but did they do this test on a 128 kilobit cellular Internet connection?