Comment by xwdv
4 years ago
This problem you described is exactly why SPAs will continue to dominate over the traditional server rendered websites.
Often when I see people arguing against SPAs, they are peddling trivial toy websites that don’t do much and don’t change much.
When you need to build a serious application on the web with quickly growing feature sets and complex state management, just use a SPA. It’s 2022.
The Basecamp guys created Hey which is a mail app not implemented as a SPA. It's probably the fastest mail app I've ever seen while delivering around 40kb of javascript.
If Hey is a toy app you then you must be working on some truly alien projects from the future or something.
While it might be fast, it feels you’re like using Rails app with turbo links. Page loads. Feels barely interactive.
Compare native Mail app and Hey. If anything should be a SPA, it’s an email app.
Also who cares how much kb of JavaScript your mail app uses? It’s completely wrong metric to optimize for an app someone uses every day, multiple times a day and likely has the app open all the time.
(Also haven’t heard people using Hey much since the launch)
SPAs dominate? Off the top of my head I can't think of a single SPA that I actually use regularly. I worked in a niche a few years back where they seemed common (configuration interfaces for embedded systems) but looking at my own habits and the sites that dominate in terms of web traffic, that's thankfully not something that has caught on generally.
I can sort of see the point if the "A" part of "SPA" actually applies to your product, but for the dominant players that doesn't seem to be the case.