4 ms·

I come across so many sites that have been needlessly built as SPAs, and so many of those are broken in ways that are really hard to understand even as a techni

I come across so many sites that have been needlessly built as SPAs, and so many of those are broken in ways that are really hard to understand even as a technically savvy user. For regular people, it's a truly appalling experience - the sites my wife has to use for work are all like this, all broken and all slow - she blames her laptop. SPAs need to die.

ep103 8y ago
Isn't this just the same as saying bad code acts badly though? People can, and have written bad websites using every technology. I can think of plenty of badly written, hard to use MVC websites from my past. It should come as no surprise, that bad developers have found ways to make badly written SPAs as well today. I don't think we should judge a technology by its worst implementations.
- hu3 8y ago
  Writing good SPAs is exponentially harder than good non-SPAs. At least from my experience.
- drcongo 8y ago
  I don't think it is, no. A plain old HTML and CSS website gives me some clues about what's happening when I click things: if I click and nothing happens I can see a progress bar in my browser that shows me that I'm waiting on network - if I do the same in a SPA I get no feedback at all. You could say that all SPA developers should be writing this feedback, but even that isn't reliable - quite often the broken SPAs _do_ show their own feedback with a spinner or similar, but still there's no way of knowing if it's actually doing something or if it's broken. I can open the web inspector and look for XHR requests, but if it's trying to do something with no XHR then again, no way of knowing. They break user expectations, and when they don't function correctly this can be hugely frustrating.
  - drcongo 8y ago
    Oh, and I forgot to mention that they often break standards that a lot of people rely on, in particular the native zoom in browsers.
pessimizer 8y ago
Web 3.0 is the internet of race conditions and hangs.

ep103 8y ago

Isn't this just the same as saying bad code acts badly though? People can, and have written bad websites using every technology. I can think of plenty of badly written, hard to use MVC websites from my past. It should come as no surprise, that bad developers have found ways to make badly written SPAs as well today. I don't think we should judge a technology by its worst implementations.

hu3 8y ago
Writing good SPAs is exponentially harder than good non-SPAs. At least from my experience.
drcongo 8y ago
I don't think it is, no. A plain old HTML and CSS website gives me some clues about what's happening when I click things: if I click and nothing happens I can see a progress bar in my browser that shows me that I'm waiting on network - if I do the same in a SPA I get no feedback at all. You could say that all SPA developers should be writing this feedback, but even that isn't reliable - quite often the broken SPAs _do_ show their own feedback with a spinner or similar, but still there's no way of knowing if it's actually doing something or if it's broken. I can open the web inspector and look for XHR requests, but if it's trying to do something with no XHR then again, no way of knowing. They break user expectations, and when they don't function correctly this can be hugely frustrating.
- drcongo 8y ago
  Oh, and I forgot to mention that they often break standards that a lot of people rely on, in particular the native zoom in browsers.

pessimizer 8y ago

Web 3.0 is the internet of race conditions and hangs.