Comment by jauntywundrkind
1 month ago
I don't find litigating this to be useful or interesting. Debating what is needed could show us lots of things we could cut. But would that bring real gain?
SPA's have really nice performance characteristics. Code is all loaded. The page can transition between states rather than total redraw. A good SPA should offer the same capabilities too, ought have URL routing and good history support.
I do think the web would be faster and simpler without SPAs. But it wouldn't be anywhere near as capable, as interesting, and as loved.
> I don't find litigating this to be useful or interesting.
I think it is useful because our field is woefully inept at anything resembling backtracking, and it's having concrete detrimental effects all over the field by, for example, increasing mountains of bloat eating up hardware improvements.
> SPA's have really nice performance characteristics. [..] A good SPA should offer the same capabilities too
The problem is that not even large teams without any obvious lack of resources are also unable to prevent sluggishness from creeping in to SPAs. So I guess there's a theoretical SPA and a de facto one.
> But it wouldn't be anywhere near as capable, as interesting, and as loved.
Capable sure, if you're creating Google Earth style apps. But when you start using vague and extremely subjective adjectives like "interesting" and "loved" it should be a signal that something's off here.
What you say sounds like we ought have suffocated and starved the web. I feel like "vague" and "subjective" is actually just pretty fucking obvious, didn't need a ton of support for it: the web is the go-to platform for app development because its featureful and works everywhere and is connected by default and nothing else comes close.
The web is where it is (literally everywhere) because it is capable and powerful, and it's because we didn't listen to retrogressive gate keepers insisting the web shouldnt really be for those uses cases.
The alternative to this is nothing. Is to not have had connected software. But we aspired to make great systems. That made some people very mad.
Nothing of that requires SPA, and the alternative is certainly not “nothing”. Not sure how you even get to that conclusion, strange rant. The meaning of alternative cost is not standing still.
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