I definitely get edge cases like Slack, but honestly don't think SPA has been a positive development, overall. I think the web was better as a document/HTML ori

I definitely get edge cases like Slack, but honestly don't think SPA has been a positive development, overall. I think the web was better as a document/HTML oriented design. It was nice and would still be nice if browser caching meant a site still worked well over a bad connection. But you can be browsing around a "static" site and hit the back button and be stuck staring at an empty or partly rendered page waiting for your flaky connection to load the page. SPAs handle that situation better even for sites that are theoretically not suited for SPAs. The simple principle of doing your best to display the data you've already fetched is extremely refreshing compared to supposedly "document-oriented" sites, which typically take the opposite approach -- we showed you this page fifteen seconds ago, but we can't show it to you again until we exchange a few megabytes of data with headquarters. And now we can't show you the other page, either. Just be patient. If it's really that important you should have taken a screenshot, mmmkay? (Slow-loading web sites are the main reason my not-so-tech-savvy family members, who are very stubborn and selective about learning anything, are all adept at taking screenshots on their phones. When it comes to information they might need later, they take screenshots, because you can't just leave a page open and trust it to be there when you need it. You might accidentally trigger some navigation and then who knows how long it will take to get back to the information they need, if it's even possible.) Browser caching should theoretically let a document-oriented web site work smoothly over a flaky connection, as long as you stick to the pages you've already viewed, right? But how often does it help even a little bit? Maybe SPAs will eventually be just as broken, but right now it seems damned cool that they make a good-faith effort to show me stuff.