4 ms·

I don't think people realize how CSS3 and HTML5 will do everything they need. And also that no one actually enjoys using a SPA.

Spivak 3y ago
But it does seem that no one enjoys actually building MPAs and that force is currently winning right now.
- boredumb 3y ago
  Using your favorite language, a simple http listerner+routing and what ever HTML templating engines are supported, MPAs are simple and enjoyable to build. I think product people enjoyed pretending they were facebook for a while and decided the world needed more infinitely scrolling SPAs and forced a lot of people into having to use react and other frontend heavy frameworks to try to wrangle all the (often times brittle) javascript involved to juggle client state. I don't think we're better off as users or developers because of this.
  - berkes 3y ago
    It's rather easy to add infinite scrolling to an MPA too, though. A few lines of JS is all you need. I'd argue this is simpler and easier than investing in a full blown ui library and state manager or painting yourself into some corner of today's JS framework.
tjpnz 3y ago
That would require accepting that the complexity merchants sold them a lie.
- syncbehind 3y ago
  > complexity merchants I have never heard of this term before. But I do think it is quite apt. Is this an established concept (can I read more about it somewhere)? Or did you come up with it on the fly?
  - tjpnz 3y ago
    Someone else coined the term and there was a HN post. I cannot find it though.
philistine 3y ago
Part of the slow adoption of ultra modern HTML tags might be that the divorce from Internet Explorer 6 to 10 finished so recently that no one has bothered to update their knowledge yet. In my corporate environment, IE 11 was removed only last year.
dimmke 3y ago
CSS3 and HTML5 are not meaningful semantic version numbers anymore and haven’t been for over a decade. Both CSS and HTML are considered “living standards” now and no longer use version numbers: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#is-this-html5 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#is-...? Nesting in CSS became broadly supported in Chromium and other evergreen browsers a few months ago. This is a feature that developers have had to use inside of some kind of tool that compiles down to “regular” CSS since 2006. That’s 17 years. 17 YEARS. And there was no major announcement when it became supported, just a blog post: https://developer.chrome.com/articles/css-nesting/ https://developer.chrome.com/articles/css-nesting/ Even now, it’s not supported by older versions of iOS/mobile Safari which could easily be 15-20% of a large US based websites’ traffic.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  > Nesting in CSS became broadly supported in Chromium and other evergreen browsers a few months ago. Firefox hasn’t shipped it yet. https://caniuse.com/css-nesting https://caniuse.com/css-nesting shows it landing in 117 next month. > Even now, it’s not supported by older versions of iOS/mobile Safari which could easily be 15-20% of a large US based websites’ traffic. Yeah, actual global support is probably still below ⅔—caniuse.com is showing global support at 72.89%, and its methodology is hopelessly broken for mobile browsers (treats all mobile Chrome/Android WebView as the latest version, which is wildly wrong), quite apart from excluding browsers that block the StatCounter script, leading to particularly heavy undercounting of Firefox and general undercounting of more conservative or unusual configurations; so the true numbers on newish features are always much worse than it suggests. For these sorts of features, if all browsers ship around the same time, you’ll normally want to wait for about another two years before you start depending on it. (When shipped out of sync, it depends—you’ll encounter two-year-old Safari more commonly than six-month-old desktop Chrome, for example.)
  - clairity 3y ago
    i've played with nesting on firefox and, much like the :has() selector, it seems good enough for the 80% case, so i wish they'd unflag it so we could get the clock started on having it be commonplace in a year or two to use it confidently.
berkes 3y ago
But with just a little JS you can have a full SPA. You don't need a virtual dom to manage some HTML tags. You don't need UI libraries to render a UI. You don't need complex state management hook flow whatevs to manage some state. You don't need routing frameworks to read and write the URL. And so on. With just HTML and CSS you can get a very long way. And if that last mile is truly a requirement, DOM APIs and a few lines of JS (or TS) have it covered. Only when all that grows wieldy do you need npm, frameworks and complex trees of dependencies.

Spivak 3y ago

But it does seem that no one enjoys actually building MPAs and that force is currently winning right now.

boredumb 3y ago
Using your favorite language, a simple http listerner+routing and what ever HTML templating engines are supported, MPAs are simple and enjoyable to build. I think product people enjoyed pretending they were facebook for a while and decided the world needed more infinitely scrolling SPAs and forced a lot of people into having to use react and other frontend heavy frameworks to try to wrangle all the (often times brittle) javascript involved to juggle client state. I don't think we're better off as users or developers because of this.
- berkes 3y ago
  It's rather easy to add infinite scrolling to an MPA too, though. A few lines of JS is all you need. I'd argue this is simpler and easier than investing in a full blown ui library and state manager or painting yourself into some corner of today's JS framework.

tjpnz 3y ago

That would require accepting that the complexity merchants sold them a lie.

syncbehind 3y ago
> complexity merchants I have never heard of this term before. But I do think it is quite apt. Is this an established concept (can I read more about it somewhere)? Or did you come up with it on the fly?
- tjpnz 3y ago
  Someone else coined the term and there was a HN post. I cannot find it though.

philistine 3y ago

Part of the slow adoption of ultra modern HTML tags might be that the divorce from Internet Explorer 6 to 10 finished so recently that no one has bothered to update their knowledge yet. In my corporate environment, IE 11 was removed only last year.

dimmke 3y ago

CSS3 and HTML5 are not meaningful semantic version numbers anymore and haven’t been for over a decade. Both CSS and HTML are considered “living standards” now and no longer use version numbers: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#is-this-html5 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#is-...? Nesting in CSS became broadly supported in Chromium and other evergreen browsers a few months ago. This is a feature that developers have had to use inside of some kind of tool that compiles down to “regular” CSS since 2006. That’s 17 years. 17 YEARS. And there was no major announcement when it became supported, just a blog post: https://developer.chrome.com/articles/css-nesting/ https://developer.chrome.com/articles/css-nesting/ Even now, it’s not supported by older versions of iOS/mobile Safari which could easily be 15-20% of a large US based websites’ traffic.

chrismorgan 3y ago
> Nesting in CSS became broadly supported in Chromium and other evergreen browsers a few months ago. Firefox hasn’t shipped it yet. https://caniuse.com/css-nesting https://caniuse.com/css-nesting shows it landing in 117 next month. > Even now, it’s not supported by older versions of iOS/mobile Safari which could easily be 15-20% of a large US based websites’ traffic. Yeah, actual global support is probably still below ⅔—caniuse.com is showing global support at 72.89%, and its methodology is hopelessly broken for mobile browsers (treats all mobile Chrome/Android WebView as the latest version, which is wildly wrong), quite apart from excluding browsers that block the StatCounter script, leading to particularly heavy undercounting of Firefox and general undercounting of more conservative or unusual configurations; so the true numbers on newish features are always much worse than it suggests. For these sorts of features, if all browsers ship around the same time, you’ll normally want to wait for about another two years before you start depending on it. (When shipped out of sync, it depends—you’ll encounter two-year-old Safari more commonly than six-month-old desktop Chrome, for example.)
- clairity 3y ago
  i've played with nesting on firefox and, much like the :has() selector, it seems good enough for the 80% case, so i wish they'd unflag it so we could get the clock started on having it be commonplace in a year or two to use it confidently.

berkes 3y ago

But with just a little JS you can have a full SPA. You don't need a virtual dom to manage some HTML tags. You don't need UI libraries to render a UI. You don't need complex state management hook flow whatevs to manage some state. You don't need routing frameworks to read and write the URL. And so on. With just HTML and CSS you can get a very long way. And if that last mile is truly a requirement, DOM APIs and a few lines of JS (or TS) have it covered. Only when all that grows wieldy do you need npm, frameworks and complex trees of dependencies.