Comment by samdoesnothing
2 days ago
That's what this type of SPA architecture leads to unfortunately. Routers should immediately display the navigated to route with place holder content / skeletons, but instead all the frameworks basically wait for all the data to load before transitioning. You can technically stream the data in but even a single awaited promise will block the navigation until it succeeds. And it's not an issue that shows up in dev because typically the data loading is instant.
Nope. Skeletons are the worst. Down with the necromancy!
They try to create a _perception_ of a quick answer while adding overhead and distracting people.
Skeletons are a loading state. Get rid of skeletons and you either have unresponsiveness or flashes of nothingness
The flashes signify actual changes. It's a secondary signal to resume paying attention to the page.
What I truly hate are animated skeleton boxes or element level spinners. Why are you trying to hold my attention on something that's not even loaded yet? We all understand the UI paradigm and implicitly understand network delay, you don't need "comfort animations" to keep me happy. I'd rather use the time to look at any of the other tabs or applications across my screens. Then the flash of content actually means something.
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Either you wait to get all the data to display the new UI, you show spinners, or you show skeletons.
Personally I prefer to wait than having multiple flashes of content but I do agree no approach is perfect.
Which is fine. Nothingness, or a generic spinner actually don't lie to me.
Skeletons lie by making an impression that the data is just about ready. So there's this failure mode where data is NOT ready because of a slow app/network, and I end up staring at a fake. Even worse, sometimes skeletons also break scrolling, so you end up even more frustrated because your controls don't work.
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It's not a perception if partial load shows some information faster than waiting for the full load
It far and away beats the alternative which is clicking on a link and nothing happening. Feedback should be within a frame or two of latency, not seconds...
That's not the only alternative, there are a range of options between those extremes.
If you let the browser change page, then you do have feedback. Super native.