Comment by shkkmo
4 years ago
> From what I can tell most of the disagreement about SPAs results from devs who are building things that aren't app-like railing against their futility vs devs who are, who become perplexed by the vitriol when they have immediate experience with their architectural benefits.
The SPA criticics from the article and this thread have repeatedly said that their issue is not with building things that need the benefits an SPA architecture brings. The criticism is that the majority of SPAs are harmed by that architecture because it is the industry default and being used when it isn't appropriate.
I get that that's the biggest problem, but there are plenty of people in the thread talking about how they're a bad idea in general (including the comment I was replying to)—which incidentally lines up with the (apparently) clickbait title "SPAs were a mistake".
For the record, I was making a general point about one of the tradeoffs with an SPA vs MPA, not making the claim that MPAs are universally better than SPAs for all use cases. I think most reasonable people can agree that there are places where SPAs are called for and places where they're not. It's the ambiguous cases that draw the conflict, and psychologically the anti-SPA people focus on the really shitty ones and the pro-SPA people focus on the use cases that would be impossible in an MPA.
Also, for what it's worth, I've worked full-time on one of the largest SPA projects in the world (~500 engineers contributing frontend code to it on an average week), so this is not coming from a place of total ignorance.
I excerpted and replied to something specific from your comment which read to me as essentially "even the cases that seem to need it probably don't" which matches both the tenor of (many of) the replies and the title of the article. But if I misread you my apologies.
That’s the thing, they are a bad idea in general because, in general, people ARE building things that don’t benefit from an SPA article. You’re the one extrapolating that they are saying ALL SPAs are bad.
> You’re the one extrapolating that they are saying ALL SPAs are bad
This was not my extrapolation. But if you skim over a comment you're likely to perceive it as falling into one broad camp or another whether that's the case or not.