Comment by ivan_gammel

6 hours ago

Have you ever developed an enterprise scale frontend applications optimized for conversion targets? It feels like you have not. You may ship your own code in a bundle, yes. All integrations come on top of that. That chatbot, tracker, A/B testing logic etc - all are loaded separately from your service provider CDN.

An user opening a web page is not expecting a full-blown app with multi-second loading times. If that happens, they bounce, and you loose revenue. Web is supposed to have very short time to first content paint and very short time to interactive, the shorter, the better, less than 0.5s is the goal. It can deliver that, if built properly. Many SPAs, bulky JS apps are built this way for developer convenience, not for end users. The only real use case for SPA is when you deal with a lot of local data. A spreadsheet, document or image editor, a diagram tool (but then wasm is probably a better choice).

You may say, you are not building enterprise grade frontend. But if you are small enough, you don’t need SPA either.

5 comments

ivan_gammel

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jazzypants  2 hours ago

Go on. How do I have no idea what I'm talking about? Why is it okay for a website to break simply because the analytics don't load? Why do you think that's good design? How is my personal, lived experience less valuable than yours?

Is it just that you're ashamed that you have made such poorly designed web apps that can't handle a few broken HTTP calls?

Is it just that you can't simply accept that JavaScript is a requirement for the modern web which is what this entire discussion is hinged upon?

  • ivan_gammel  2 hours ago

    >How do I have no idea what I'm talking about?

    You dismissed A/B testing as unnecessary. That is sufficient for this judgement. A/B tests mostly run on the happy path scenario of a customer: An A/B test breaks, the company is losing money at light speed.

    The loading-related issues overall may eat 0,5-1% of the revenue. It is not something that should be an afterthought.

    • jazzypants  2 hours ago

      Lol, okay. I didn't know that every single customer was going to go through a tunnel as they loaded the page.

      I didn't dismiss A/B testing. I'm just saying that, if the analytics don't load on the client, you should already have A loaded and ready to render. It's literally just a matter of a try/catch, and you shouldn't be waiting to load this stuff on the client-side anyways if this is truly supposed to be the "Happy Path".

      Yes, I know that legacy software like Google Tag Manager requires client-side integration, but I would argue that is an orthogonal concern. You don't need to use that for your A/B testing. It's pretty easy to integrate this stuff into SSR-- especially if you stream in the HTML. This is why cookies exist.

      And, again, none of this changes the central concept of this comment thread: JavaScript is necessary for the modern web experience.

jazzypants  2 hours ago

> chatbot, tracker, A/B testing logic etc

Literally none of those things are necessary for a working website. If your site breaks when your analytics don't load, then that's just horrible design at any scale.