3 ms·

I'm not sure if it does or not, but either way it seems like initial page load is the important part. SourceHut is not a single page app, so to compare apples t

I'm not sure if it does or not, but either way it seems like initial page load is the important part. SourceHut is not a single page app, so to compare apples to apples you'd want to load each page individually. Also, it still takes forever to switch between things on Bitbucket after the initial page load. In general for simple things like this with distinct pages, I'm pretty convinced that "single page app" just means that you've made your site infinitely more complicated, more likely to have issues, and more likely to have accessibility problems, for both developers and users for no benefit other than using some trendy new thing.

z0mbie42 6y ago
The idea of SPA, is to not have to send 'useless' data at every page change (like the HTML layout), but only the strict necessary data with a JSON payload. Especially coupled with good caching. Also it offloads computation done on the server to clients (templating). So generally yes SPA are heavier, but they are more powerful. It's a matter of tradeoffs.
- SamWhited 6y ago
  Or you could just make the HTML and what not simpler and then who cares? The useless data is fine if you don't already have the problem of sending tons of extra crap that nobody needs. Single page stuff can still use templating on the server side.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  As long as they've existed, SPAs have been faster, but only in theory ;) I don't think I've _ever_ seen one that's faster than the normal webapp it replaced. Except possibly for Google's first attempt on gmail, which was pretty snappy. Fortunately they've since replaced it with a sluggish behemoth, so order has been restored to the universe.
  - SamWhited 6y ago
    With the possible exception you mentioned (I switched to FastMail long ago to get back to that snappy feeling) my experience with SPAs is that they all add 10 megs of JavaScript up front and several dozen kbs of JSON or similar per click to save a couple tens of bytes per page of HTML. I pulled those numbers out of the air obviously, but I'm not sure that they're even exaggerations…

z0mbie42 6y ago

The idea of SPA, is to not have to send 'useless' data at every page change (like the HTML layout), but only the strict necessary data with a JSON payload. Especially coupled with good caching. Also it offloads computation done on the server to clients (templating). So generally yes SPA are heavier, but they are more powerful. It's a matter of tradeoffs.

SamWhited 6y ago
Or you could just make the HTML and what not simpler and then who cares? The useless data is fine if you don't already have the problem of sending tons of extra crap that nobody needs. Single page stuff can still use templating on the server side.
rsynnott 6y ago
As long as they've existed, SPAs have been faster, but only in theory ;) I don't think I've _ever_ seen one that's faster than the normal webapp it replaced. Except possibly for Google's first attempt on gmail, which was pretty snappy. Fortunately they've since replaced it with a sluggish behemoth, so order has been restored to the universe.
- SamWhited 6y ago
  With the possible exception you mentioned (I switched to FastMail long ago to get back to that snappy feeling) my experience with SPAs is that they all add 10 megs of JavaScript up front and several dozen kbs of JSON or similar per click to save a couple tens of bytes per page of HTML. I pulled those numbers out of the air obviously, but I'm not sure that they're even exaggerations…