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Constantly innovating can also be interpreted as 'having no standard'. I had developed sites for 25 years. I still have a corporate site that was developed 20

Constantly innovating can also be interpreted as 'having no standard'. I had developed sites for 25 years. I still have a corporate site that was developed 20 years ago, and it returns more results, and is faster to render than most of new fangled SPA I seen deployed on servers 20x larger. I do agree with you that SPA (react and its ilk) have cleaner benefit of composability of components, but I would posit that AJAX and component state/props has made for less reliable web. I often find myself in situation where SPAs crash mid way during concert or flight purchase - be it JS error, or network instability. Reloading the page doesn't get SPA to resume where it crashed, but often throws additional errors, saying I am already mid way in checkout (but I can't continue), or invalidating session (but still remembering that my other session was in process of buying a seat, so I can't reselect the seat I wanted. Finally, they are terrible for bookmarking or sharing. So the composability of components, a benefit, came with a need for developer to be extra careful about failure modes, resuming states, bookmarking directly to specific content. Most developers are not careful, and the old html per page model forces different mentality for dealing with failures, and content availability.

sgt 4y ago
People are emotionally attached to SPA's because they are: 1) Annoyed by page refreshes 2) SPA's is a special skill now, frontend developers take pride in knowing everything about React, Vue, Angular and spending hours and hours updating their NPM dependencies. How can they justify all the time spent if it's not almost like a science? 3) Separates the frontend guys from the backend guys. Technologies like HTMX allows the backend developer to pretty much do the whole job, which concerns a few people.
- robertoandred 4y ago
  Allowing a backend dev to do frontend should concern everyone. They are very distinct skillsets.
  - sgt 4y ago
    That's not true though. Yes, if it needs to be a complex and breathtaking frontend that has all the bells and the whistles. But backend developers often need or have a desire to build a perfectly usable frontend for their service, without relying on a frontend person to start with. This could be due to project ambitions or budget.
- sanitycheck 4y ago
  Eh, backend devs don't want to do the whole job. They want to provide a single excessively complicated API which all client-side (web, Android, iOS, TV, IoT, etc) devs can consume without disturbing them (at the cost of 10 requests to render a single page). They definitely do not want to be involved in generating specific HTML fragments and subsequently fiddling with them whenever a designer decides something needs a minor alteration. I've looked a bit for examples of HTMX in the wild, and the only times I've found it it's been so slow I would have preferred a full page refresh which at least lets me bookmark/navigate properly and involves no JS at all. Not enough data to really form a strong opinion though, I freely admit.
  - sgt 4y ago
    > They want to provide a single excessively complicated API which all client-side (web, Android, iOS, TV, IoT, etc) devs can consume without disturbing them (at the cost of 10 requests to render a single page) I've seen that quite a few times. Basically moving the entire business logic to the frontend, so that the backend can remain elegant and generic (yet somehow complicated too). In the end it actually makes for a slower app experience and may cause insane complexity on the frontend.
TigerTeamX 4y ago
This. Especially airplane bookings always fail.

sgt 4y ago

People are emotionally attached to SPA's because they are: 1) Annoyed by page refreshes 2) SPA's is a special skill now, frontend developers take pride in knowing everything about React, Vue, Angular and spending hours and hours updating their NPM dependencies. How can they justify all the time spent if it's not almost like a science? 3) Separates the frontend guys from the backend guys. Technologies like HTMX allows the backend developer to pretty much do the whole job, which concerns a few people.

robertoandred 4y ago
Allowing a backend dev to do frontend should concern everyone. They are very distinct skillsets.
- sgt 4y ago
  That's not true though. Yes, if it needs to be a complex and breathtaking frontend that has all the bells and the whistles. But backend developers often need or have a desire to build a perfectly usable frontend for their service, without relying on a frontend person to start with. This could be due to project ambitions or budget.
sanitycheck 4y ago
Eh, backend devs don't want to do the whole job. They want to provide a single excessively complicated API which all client-side (web, Android, iOS, TV, IoT, etc) devs can consume without disturbing them (at the cost of 10 requests to render a single page). They definitely do not want to be involved in generating specific HTML fragments and subsequently fiddling with them whenever a designer decides something needs a minor alteration. I've looked a bit for examples of HTMX in the wild, and the only times I've found it it's been so slow I would have preferred a full page refresh which at least lets me bookmark/navigate properly and involves no JS at all. Not enough data to really form a strong opinion though, I freely admit.
- sgt 4y ago
  > They want to provide a single excessively complicated API which all client-side (web, Android, iOS, TV, IoT, etc) devs can consume without disturbing them (at the cost of 10 requests to render a single page) I've seen that quite a few times. Basically moving the entire business logic to the frontend, so that the backend can remain elegant and generic (yet somehow complicated too). In the end it actually makes for a slower app experience and may cause insane complexity on the frontend.

TigerTeamX 4y ago

This. Especially airplane bookings always fail.