I don't like them because they're against the nature of the web.
They override routing, they override SEO, they make it hard to use build in browser tools, etc, etc.
None of my projects want to be SPAs
281–290 of 362 posts
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#282This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Why? Because big companies like Facebook and Google use them. Why? Because they actually are doing things that require them. 99% of the SPAs in production are things that should have been done the old Rails/Django/Laravel way, but that would not set you up as a developer w…
> This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Unfortunately this is another side effect of the broken hiring process in IT. Recruiters are scanning resumes for the hottest buzzwords, hiring managers want people who have experience with whatever is currently hyped, so developers naturally steer towards those technolo…
Some years ago, 3 of us picked React for a startup. I consider it the single biggest mistake in my career, but we picked it not for the reason you mention. We didn't think that far (I was perhaps a junior, but the others weren't). It was just a matter of picking the frontend framework that we liked the best (I think the options were between Backbone, Ember, AngularJS, React). In our minds we did pick the simple option.
Some may be aware, but certainly not everyone.
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#283I come across so many sites that have been needlessly built as SPAs, and so many of those are broken in ways that are really hard to understand even as a technically savvy user. For regular people, it's a truly appalling experience - the sites my wife has to use for work are all like this, all broken and all slow - she blames her laptop. SPAs need to die.
Isn't this just the same as saying bad code acts badly though? People can, and have written bad websites using every technology. I can think of plenty of badly written, hard to use MVC websites from my past. It should come as no surprise, that bad developers have found ways to make badly written SPAs as well today. I don't think we should judge a technology by its worst implementations.
I don't think it is, no. A plain old HTML and CSS website gives me some clues about what's happening when I click things: if I click and nothing happens I can see a progress bar in my browser that shows me that I'm waiting on network - if I do the same in a SPA I get no feedback at all. You could say that all SPA developers should be writing this feedback, but even that isn't reliable - quite often the broken SPAs _do_ show their own feedback with a spinner or similar, but still there's no way of knowing if it's actually doing something or if it's broken. I can open the web inspector and look for XHR requests, but if it's trying to do something with no XHR then again, no way of knowing. They break user expectations, and when they don't function correctly this can be hugely frustrating.
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Unfortunately this is another side effect of the broken hiring process in IT. Recruiters are scanning resumes for the hottest buzzwords, hiring managers want people who have experience with whatever is currently hyped, so developers naturally steer towards those technolo…
Some years ago, 3 of us picked React for a startup. I consider it the single biggest mistake in my career, but we picked it not for the reason you mention. We didn't think that far (I was perhaps a junior, but the others weren't). It was just a matter of picking the frontend framework that we liked the best (I think the options were between Backbone, Ember, AngularJS, React). In our minds we did pick the simple optio…
If you had to redo what would you pick? Why not jQuery?
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this just the same as saying bad code acts badly though? People can, and have written bad websites using every technology. I can think of plenty of badly written, hard to use MVC websites from my past. It should come as no surprise, that bad developers have found ways to make badly written SPAs as well today. I don't think we should judge a technology by its worst implementations.
I don't think it is, no. A plain old HTML and CSS website gives me some clues about what's happening when I click things: if I click and nothing happens I can see a progress bar in my browser that shows me that I'm waiting on network - if I do the same in a SPA I get no feedback at all. You could say that all SPA developers should be writing this feedback, but even that isn't reliable - quite often the broken SPAs _d…
Oh, and I forgot to mention that they often break standards that a lot of people rely on, in particular the native zoom in browsers.
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#286This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Why? Because big companies like Facebook and Google use them. Why? Because they actually are doing things that require them. 99% of the SPAs in production are things that should have been done the old Rails/Django/Laravel way, but that would not set you up as a developer w…
> Because they actually are doing things that require them.
Citation needed. G-Suite's admin pages are half "modern" SPA monstrosities that suck up my RAM and peg my CPU to render a bunch of whitespace with bits of information strewn around, and ugly but functional regular pages whose performance is killed for being framed inside a SPA frankenapp.
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#287This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them. Why? Because big companies like Facebook and Google use them. Why? Because they actually are doing things that require them. 99% of the SPAs in production are things that should have been done the old Rails/Django/Laravel way, but that would not set you up as a developer w…
> This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them.
This may be even meaner, but they usually end up demonstrating they can’t. 99% of them are terrible. Even Google’s latest efforts are a bit on the slow, low-information-density side.
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about tabs? SPA can make tabs troublesome. If I can't open a site in tabs it is broken to me.
Browser-side routing/state management is a solved problem - SPAs can make tabs troublesome if the developer didn't put in the effort.
Using web API means tabs work even if the developer doesn't put in the effort.
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that help much? The distinction between "web app" and "web page" seems fuzzier than the question "would a SPA lib/framework be useful here?" Is Reddit a web app? Is Twitter? Facebook? They all started with server-generated HTML, all kinda feel "document-like", all of them involve scrolling (if that means anything.) Is the "app" boundary further along the chain, like at Google Docs? I think instead of trying to c…
It's really easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater in this conversation as well. A more interactive Javascript-heavy UI can improve a lot of aspects of even websites we consider to be a server-side-rendered gold standard like a forum or message board. For example, look at the right-sidebar scrubber on Flarum that lets you quickly scroll to arbitrary parts of a long forum thread: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/17…
Hrm. I apparently angered it by scrolling to fast, and it froze for about a second. I think I prefer ordinary forums...
Re: None of my projects want to be SPAs
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, SPAs are attractive even for websites that don't particularly benefit from them because of the technical attractiveness of having the website be like any other client that consumes your server's API.
exactly that. since 2012 i build all my websites as SPAs for this reason. more so, i am not even writing any new backends. i reuse the same backend over and over. most websites (at least the ones i have been building) are just CRUD and don't really need a custom backend. SPAs bring back the client-server architecture we had before the web. you build desktop clients that consume server-api's. server-side html generati…
You are falling into a comfortable trap where it is easier to do the same. If you took the time to learn laravel your development time can be cut in half.