Comment by em-bee
14 hours ago
Application that searches the apartments to rent? Not really I would say.
not a good example. i can't find it now, but there was a story/comment about a realtor app that people used to sell houses. often when they were out with a potential buyer they had bad internet access and loading new data and pictures for houses was a pain. it wasn't until they switched to using a frontend framework to preload everything with the occasional updates that the app became usable.
low latency affects any interaction with a site. even hackernews is a pain to read over low latency and would improve if new comments where loaded in the background. the problem creeps up on you faster than you think.
Prefetching pages doesn't require a frontend framework though. All it takes is a simple script to preload all or specific anchor links on the page, or you could get fancier with a service worker and a site manifest if you want to preload pages that may not be linked on the current page.
It shouldn't need any scripts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching
It can also be imposed by the client, e.g. via a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accelerator
Yep, that works as well. I'll reach for a script still if I want more logic around when to prefetch, like only prefetching on link hover or focus. A script is also needed for any links that you need to preload but aren't included on the current page.