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SPAs being the darks ages is over-the-top, but being an SPA when other web architectures could better serve the user is a dark pattern. That tax app doesn't nee

SPAs being the darks ages is over-the-top, but being an SPA when other web architectures could better serve the user is a dark pattern. That tax app doesn't need to be an SPA. JavaScript powered interactions make the experience nicer for the user, but that doesn't mean it needs or is improved by being a single page.

muglug 7y ago
I think an SPA can be much more user-friendly than a traditional series of server-rendered pages. Email is a great example of this - GMail, at launch, had much better UX than existing server-rendered applications like Hotmail. You can find bad UX everywhere - in SPAs and server-rendered interfaces alike - but there’s nothing implicit to SPAs that reduces usability.
- julianlam 7y ago
  I feel like Gmail has lost that edge. Email being a text medium should be fast, but Gmail using up many hundreds of megabytes of RAM and taking many seconds to load really feels like they've lost sight of what reading an email is about.
  - wyqydsyq 7y ago
    I too despise the "kitchen sink" approach seen in Gmail's UI where they are trying to cram every unwanted and unnecessary feature into your view and RAM at once. If you used "Inbox for Gmail" before Google abandoned it and miss the much cleaner and focused UI, this Chrome extension upgrades Gmail to have the same styles: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-gmail/pbmlfaiicoikhdbjagjbglnbfcbcojpj/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-gmail/pbm...
- boomlinde 7y ago
  Gmail wasn't a single page at launch, so its UX advantage had nothing to do with that.
  - acephal 7y ago
    Wasn't long-polling the killer feature?
chrysoprace 7y ago
No, it doesn't need to be, but it is nicer. There's quite a lot of complexities to my country's tax law (as with any country's tax law, really) and it's heavily simplified by giving you highly dynamic choices. Trying to use my country's immigration site, which has some JavaScript sprinkled on but is largely static, is a largely inferior experience.
- ShinTakuya 7y ago
  There's no reason you can't query a backend for the complexities and present those dynamically to the user. For instance, quite often an SPA might ping the backend for a list of states or provinces once you've selected a country.
  - chrysoprace 7y ago
    Sure. It's up to the engineer implementing said app to determine the best fit for the project. At the end of the day, you have to choose what's right for your users; whether that's a seamless experience with no full page reloads, or the occasional full page reload.
ng12 7y ago
"Single page" isn't the why it's the how. It enables you to take a JavaScript-first approach which in turn makes building complicated applications easier.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  > It enables you to take a JavaScript-first approach Uh-huh... > which in turn makes building complicated applications easier. What? This is vacuous market-speak.
  - ng12 7y ago
    I mean... not really. I wouldn't invest in building client-side applications unless they bought me something. My customers don't really care, the majority don't even know what an SPA is. They do care that our application is faster and has more features than our competitors.
  - wyqydsyq 7y ago
    To word it more technically, building an SPA allows you to build applications as declarative composable functions which are deterministic, as opposed to the spaghetti code commonly seen in the days of jQuery and PHP which is harder to read, reason about, debug and maintain due to their imperative and nondeterministic nature.
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      I literally can't tell if your comment is satire or not. I hope it is. I fear it isn't.
      - wyqydsyq 7y ago
        It isn't. I elaborated a bit in my later comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22523344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22523344
    - rovr138 7y ago
wyqydsyq 7y ago
If it's a web-based user interface as this tax app sounds to be, it is arguably improved purely by being an SPA. Requiring full page reloads just to submit or change some tiny bit of data in a page is objectively bad UX.
- julianlam 7y ago
  Besides doing my taxes on paper, I can't think of anything more tedious than filling out tax forms via a vanilla HTML form. At least my SPA tax software makes the form filling a little more exciting, and doesn't s#!t the bed when I hit enter by accident
  - non-entity 7y ago
    Personally I wish more forms did have enter bound to submittal
  - colecut 7y ago
    Simple form validation would prevent that, not exactly SPA worthy.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Mostly I want my forms to be reliable, that doesn't seem to be the case for many SPA's. Getting a blank page is a very common experience and much worse than a barely discernible delay submitting a form.
- zelphirkalt 7y ago
  A problem is, that I need to fiddle around with JS blocking, even on official websites from city, state or gov, because they hired inresponsible web devs or made inresponsible decisions to let Google and others track me on their website. So initially they will be blocked. As far as "experts" for SPA are concerned, they often do not even include a noscript tag, which means I see a white page. Now it cannot become less user friendly than that. I've yet to see a SPA, which offers a working alternative via noscript tag, when I blocked all their tracking. The thing is that SPA all too often serves as a way to force tracking onto the unsuspecting user. "You need to allow our JS! Your browser is outdated! Use Chrome!" and the unsophisticated person will think: "Oh well, lets just whitelist this page dammit!"

muglug 7y ago

I think an SPA can be much more user-friendly than a traditional series of server-rendered pages. Email is a great example of this - GMail, at launch, had much better UX than existing server-rendered applications like Hotmail. You can find bad UX everywhere - in SPAs and server-rendered interfaces alike - but there’s nothing implicit to SPAs that reduces usability.

julianlam 7y ago
I feel like Gmail has lost that edge. Email being a text medium should be fast, but Gmail using up many hundreds of megabytes of RAM and taking many seconds to load really feels like they've lost sight of what reading an email is about.
- wyqydsyq 7y ago
  I too despise the "kitchen sink" approach seen in Gmail's UI where they are trying to cram every unwanted and unnecessary feature into your view and RAM at once. If you used "Inbox for Gmail" before Google abandoned it and miss the much cleaner and focused UI, this Chrome extension upgrades Gmail to have the same styles: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-gmail/pbmlfaiicoikhdbjagjbglnbfcbcojpj/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-gmail/pbm...
boomlinde 7y ago
Gmail wasn't a single page at launch, so its UX advantage had nothing to do with that.
- acephal 7y ago
  Wasn't long-polling the killer feature?

chrysoprace 7y ago

No, it doesn't need to be, but it is nicer. There's quite a lot of complexities to my country's tax law (as with any country's tax law, really) and it's heavily simplified by giving you highly dynamic choices. Trying to use my country's immigration site, which has some JavaScript sprinkled on but is largely static, is a largely inferior experience.

ShinTakuya 7y ago
There's no reason you can't query a backend for the complexities and present those dynamically to the user. For instance, quite often an SPA might ping the backend for a list of states or provinces once you've selected a country.
- chrysoprace 7y ago
  Sure. It's up to the engineer implementing said app to determine the best fit for the project. At the end of the day, you have to choose what's right for your users; whether that's a seamless experience with no full page reloads, or the occasional full page reload.

ng12 7y ago

"Single page" isn't the why it's the how. It enables you to take a JavaScript-first approach which in turn makes building complicated applications easier.

henrikschroder 7y ago
> It enables you to take a JavaScript-first approach Uh-huh... > which in turn makes building complicated applications easier. What? This is vacuous market-speak.
- ng12 7y ago
  I mean... not really. I wouldn't invest in building client-side applications unless they bought me something. My customers don't really care, the majority don't even know what an SPA is. They do care that our application is faster and has more features than our competitors.
- wyqydsyq 7y ago
  To word it more technically, building an SPA allows you to build applications as declarative composable functions which are deterministic, as opposed to the spaghetti code commonly seen in the days of jQuery and PHP which is harder to read, reason about, debug and maintain due to their imperative and nondeterministic nature.
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    I literally can't tell if your comment is satire or not. I hope it is. I fear it isn't.
    - wyqydsyq 7y ago
      It isn't. I elaborated a bit in my later comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22523344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22523344
  - rovr138 7y ago

wyqydsyq 7y ago

If it's a web-based user interface as this tax app sounds to be, it is arguably improved purely by being an SPA. Requiring full page reloads just to submit or change some tiny bit of data in a page is objectively bad UX.

julianlam 7y ago
Besides doing my taxes on paper, I can't think of anything more tedious than filling out tax forms via a vanilla HTML form. At least my SPA tax software makes the form filling a little more exciting, and doesn't s#!t the bed when I hit enter by accident
- non-entity 7y ago
  Personally I wish more forms did have enter bound to submittal
- colecut 7y ago
  Simple form validation would prevent that, not exactly SPA worthy.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Mostly I want my forms to be reliable, that doesn't seem to be the case for many SPA's. Getting a blank page is a very common experience and much worse than a barely discernible delay submitting a form.
zelphirkalt 7y ago
A problem is, that I need to fiddle around with JS blocking, even on official websites from city, state or gov, because they hired inresponsible web devs or made inresponsible decisions to let Google and others track me on their website. So initially they will be blocked. As far as "experts" for SPA are concerned, they often do not even include a noscript tag, which means I see a white page. Now it cannot become less user friendly than that. I've yet to see a SPA, which offers a working alternative via noscript tag, when I blocked all their tracking. The thing is that SPA all too often serves as a way to force tracking onto the unsuspecting user. "You need to allow our JS! Your browser is outdated! Use Chrome!" and the unsophisticated person will think: "Oh well, lets just whitelist this page dammit!"