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Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies. This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It'

Every time a web designer complains that a full-page refresh is "jarring", a bit of me dies. This is like saying a lightbulb turning on quickly is jarring. It's the expected, immediate behavior. If every lightbulb I used turned on with different durations and easing functions or flashed colors at me, or loaded a flashing placeholder while the lightbulb loaded, that would be jarring.

jaywalk 6y ago
A full-page refresh when I vote on a comment would be jarring. That's what he's saying.
- timw4mail 6y ago
  If it works without JS enabled that way, but works the current way with JavaScript, what's the problem?
  - ss3000 6y ago
    As far as I'm concerned, the problem is the people who choose to disable JavaScript and demand to be catered to without considering how much extra development resources I'd have to allocate to maintain a version of my app that works with JavaScript disabled, despite barely even constituting a rounding error in my usage statistics, and the JavaScript version offering a vastly superior experience for the rest of my users.
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      Everyone has JavaScript disabled sometimes. https://kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html https://kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html
- rich_harris 6y ago
  Or when I click the 'reply' button to post this very comment, which does result in a jarring full-page refresh — and one that instantly robs me of the fuller context in which I'm replying.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    But this gives you the option of opening the reply link in a background tab (via click-and-hold or middle-click, depending on your UI). Can't do that in a JavaScript SPA without re-hydrating tens of megabytes of JS for each tab you load.
    - rich_harris 6y ago
      > without re-hydrating tens of megabytes of JS for each tab you load You'll be taken more seriously if you don't engage in meaningless hyberbole. You could recreate the open-the-reply-page-in-a-new-tab behaviour of HN (with the context-preserving JS enhancement for the non-middle-clickers) with a few kilobytes of JS if you're doing it right.
      - quantummkv 6y ago
        > You could recreate the open-the-reply-page-in-a-new-tab behaviour of HN That is the crux of the problem. Why is there this obsessive need to recreate what is already available? > with a few kilobytes of JS if you're doing it right. As experienced with PHP developers in the dark ages, that never works. It will be a choice between easy and incorrect or difficult and right. The majority will never do it right for various reasons. And the web will loose in the eyes of the users.
        Vinnl 6y ago
        > That is the crux of the problem. Why is there this obsessive need to recreate what is already available? For exactly the reasons stated: to both support in-line reply without the jarring page refresh, and to be able to open the reply form in a background tab. And I think what Rich wants/is working on is making it both easy and right, because indeed, otherwise it will never happen.
      - MayeulC 6y ago
        It's funny to think about it that way given how much we've pushed back on them over the years, but a pop-up window might actually provide the best experience (bonus points if it was local to the tab). I just shift-clicked reply, and it works quite well. I might add a rule to my sway config to make the "Add comment" windows floating :) In the end, everyone is different and has different needs. That's why I like standards: everyone can set their user experience as they prefer it (or pick a web browser that chooses good defaults for them).
coffeefirst 6y ago
Yeah, I don't get that at all. Especially if you can make the next page really fast. I'm also kind of gawking at the screencast he uses as an example: https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1186675229621248000 https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1186675229621248000 Ryan Florence makes a fine point that his tool is being used to build things that don't benefit from it, but this isn't necessarily a good interface. It's pretty but it's just got way too much going on at once. How does anyone actually read in that context?
- ssivark 6y ago
  It seems more oriented to browsing/scanning, and particularly nice for that IMHO. What would be a baseline for comparison?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
amw-zero 6y ago
Why do you assume that it's just web designers? Have you ever shown a web app vs. a native app to someone who doesn't write code? Or just someone who has design sensibility? The lightbulb example is also not a good one. A lightbulb transitions between two states. An interactive application transitions between hundreds of states. Full page refreshes make each transition clunky and noticeable. Only programmers look at it and say "yea, that's fine," because we know how difficult a web browser is to implement. But end users don't care about difficulty. They care about the end result.
- fenwick67 6y ago
  I don't really have a problem with web apps doing incremental loading when it makes sense (Facebook, for example, or letting the user add a comment in situ), but many many sites would be better off just loading documents instead of moving to an application framework. Take for instance TechCrunch.com vs Wired.com, Wired is much easier to use because it acts like a website. Yes, it does full page refreshes instead of showing a full-page loading spinner, but it behaves more consistently and doesn't require the user to learn new UI paradigms.
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    What about Google Sheets? It would be pretty strange to input a number into a cell and have the page refresh to perform a calculation no? Frankly I'm not sure how any application falls into the document paradigm. It was created for linking documents of text, not interactive applications.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Well, I might be biased as you are saying, and much of this is subjective, but I much prefer a snappy browsing experience, where clicking a link takes no longer than the round-trip time (25-50 ms in most cases) to load the web page. Have you tried the dillo web browser, for instance? It's refreshingly fast and snappy (including on my old atom netbook from 2008) to use. I have had a subjective feeling for a while that some user interfaces felt "solid", almost tangible. To me, Windows XP does that. Windows 10 feels like a smokescreen next to it. There might be pretty colors, fancy gradients, but I do not feel like I directly control the UI anymore, I am forced to wait for an animation to finish, I have trouble determining where the window border is. And I've found it much harder to rely on my positional memory to navigate apps that have a smooth transition, like mobile apps. This is not a rant against Windows10's UI (I have barely used it, and just use it to draw a comparison in the Windows family, you could also compare different KDE versions), but with contemporary user interfaces in general. That could even be said of some command-line interfaces. We're also used to progress bars, or worse: spinners. Trained to wait idle in front of our computers, while a dozen megabytes of frameworks are stuffed down the pipe so that the page background is just the right white shade (probably while I am using a dark theme, and the CSS rules to apply that shade probably only work correctly on Google chrome). That's what modern web feels like to me.
Spivak 6y ago
But what you’re describing with lightbulbs is basically an ode to the technical limitations of the time they were invented. We have had dimmable bulbs that are far less jarring for a long time and now smart bulbs can do the easing automatically when you flip the switch, and change color and brightness depending on time and environment. It’s such a nice improvement. I don’t even notice until I turn it off and I realize that white light at night is piercing and yellow light during the day makes me sleepy. Or that 100% brightness in the morning and night is way too much. I think it’s a case of not wanting to go back once you realize what you’ve been missing. Sure the world you describe with flashing bulbs would be horrible but that’s not what it’s really like.
subpixel 6y ago
I agree, and moreover I find the native app animated transitions held up as the end-goal to be nothing short of awful.
turnipla 6y ago
It depends. Neat short animations can be nice. Even your lightbulb “dimming in” and out would be quite nice. What you’re complaining about is the lightbulb taking 3 seconds to turn off and its toggle costing $100. Now that something nobody likes.

jaywalk 6y ago

A full-page refresh when I vote on a comment would be jarring. That's what he's saying.

timw4mail 6y ago
If it works without JS enabled that way, but works the current way with JavaScript, what's the problem?
- ss3000 6y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, the problem is the people who choose to disable JavaScript and demand to be catered to without considering how much extra development resources I'd have to allocate to maintain a version of my app that works with JavaScript disabled, despite barely even constituting a rounding error in my usage statistics, and the JavaScript version offering a vastly superior experience for the rest of my users.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    Everyone has JavaScript disabled sometimes. https://kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html https://kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html
rich_harris 6y ago
Or when I click the 'reply' button to post this very comment, which does result in a jarring full-page refresh — and one that instantly robs me of the fuller context in which I'm replying.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  But this gives you the option of opening the reply link in a background tab (via click-and-hold or middle-click, depending on your UI). Can't do that in a JavaScript SPA without re-hydrating tens of megabytes of JS for each tab you load.
  - rich_harris 6y ago
    > without re-hydrating tens of megabytes of JS for each tab you load You'll be taken more seriously if you don't engage in meaningless hyberbole. You could recreate the open-the-reply-page-in-a-new-tab behaviour of HN (with the context-preserving JS enhancement for the non-middle-clickers) with a few kilobytes of JS if you're doing it right.
    - quantummkv 6y ago
      > You could recreate the open-the-reply-page-in-a-new-tab behaviour of HN That is the crux of the problem. Why is there this obsessive need to recreate what is already available? > with a few kilobytes of JS if you're doing it right. As experienced with PHP developers in the dark ages, that never works. It will be a choice between easy and incorrect or difficult and right. The majority will never do it right for various reasons. And the web will loose in the eyes of the users.
      - Vinnl 6y ago
        > That is the crux of the problem. Why is there this obsessive need to recreate what is already available? For exactly the reasons stated: to both support in-line reply without the jarring page refresh, and to be able to open the reply form in a background tab. And I think what Rich wants/is working on is making it both easy and right, because indeed, otherwise it will never happen.
    - MayeulC 6y ago
      It's funny to think about it that way given how much we've pushed back on them over the years, but a pop-up window might actually provide the best experience (bonus points if it was local to the tab). I just shift-clicked reply, and it works quite well. I might add a rule to my sway config to make the "Add comment" windows floating :) In the end, everyone is different and has different needs. That's why I like standards: everyone can set their user experience as they prefer it (or pick a web browser that chooses good defaults for them).

coffeefirst 6y ago

Yeah, I don't get that at all. Especially if you can make the next page really fast. I'm also kind of gawking at the screencast he uses as an example: https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1186675229621248000 https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/1186675229621248000 Ryan Florence makes a fine point that his tool is being used to build things that don't benefit from it, but this isn't necessarily a good interface. It's pretty but it's just got way too much going on at once. How does anyone actually read in that context?

ssivark 6y ago
It seems more oriented to browsing/scanning, and particularly nice for that IMHO. What would be a baseline for comparison?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

amw-zero 6y ago

Why do you assume that it's just web designers? Have you ever shown a web app vs. a native app to someone who doesn't write code? Or just someone who has design sensibility? The lightbulb example is also not a good one. A lightbulb transitions between two states. An interactive application transitions between hundreds of states. Full page refreshes make each transition clunky and noticeable. Only programmers look at it and say "yea, that's fine," because we know how difficult a web browser is to implement. But end users don't care about difficulty. They care about the end result.

fenwick67 6y ago
I don't really have a problem with web apps doing incremental loading when it makes sense (Facebook, for example, or letting the user add a comment in situ), but many many sites would be better off just loading documents instead of moving to an application framework. Take for instance TechCrunch.com vs Wired.com, Wired is much easier to use because it acts like a website. Yes, it does full page refreshes instead of showing a full-page loading spinner, but it behaves more consistently and doesn't require the user to learn new UI paradigms.
- amw-zero 6y ago
  What about Google Sheets? It would be pretty strange to input a number into a cell and have the page refresh to perform a calculation no? Frankly I'm not sure how any application falls into the document paradigm. It was created for linking documents of text, not interactive applications.
MayeulC 6y ago
Well, I might be biased as you are saying, and much of this is subjective, but I much prefer a snappy browsing experience, where clicking a link takes no longer than the round-trip time (25-50 ms in most cases) to load the web page. Have you tried the dillo web browser, for instance? It's refreshingly fast and snappy (including on my old atom netbook from 2008) to use. I have had a subjective feeling for a while that some user interfaces felt "solid", almost tangible. To me, Windows XP does that. Windows 10 feels like a smokescreen next to it. There might be pretty colors, fancy gradients, but I do not feel like I directly control the UI anymore, I am forced to wait for an animation to finish, I have trouble determining where the window border is. And I've found it much harder to rely on my positional memory to navigate apps that have a smooth transition, like mobile apps. This is not a rant against Windows10's UI (I have barely used it, and just use it to draw a comparison in the Windows family, you could also compare different KDE versions), but with contemporary user interfaces in general. That could even be said of some command-line interfaces. We're also used to progress bars, or worse: spinners. Trained to wait idle in front of our computers, while a dozen megabytes of frameworks are stuffed down the pipe so that the page background is just the right white shade (probably while I am using a dark theme, and the CSS rules to apply that shade probably only work correctly on Google chrome). That's what modern web feels like to me.

Spivak 6y ago

But what you’re describing with lightbulbs is basically an ode to the technical limitations of the time they were invented. We have had dimmable bulbs that are far less jarring for a long time and now smart bulbs can do the easing automatically when you flip the switch, and change color and brightness depending on time and environment. It’s such a nice improvement. I don’t even notice until I turn it off and I realize that white light at night is piercing and yellow light during the day makes me sleepy. Or that 100% brightness in the morning and night is way too much. I think it’s a case of not wanting to go back once you realize what you’ve been missing. Sure the world you describe with flashing bulbs would be horrible but that’s not what it’s really like.

subpixel 6y ago

I agree, and moreover I find the native app animated transitions held up as the end-goal to be nothing short of awful.

turnipla 6y ago

It depends. Neat short animations can be nice. Even your lightbulb “dimming in” and out would be quite nice. What you’re complaining about is the lightbulb taking 3 seconds to turn off and its toggle costing $100. Now that something nobody likes.