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> The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites It is not only Figma or Photoshop. Any site

> The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites It is not only Figma or Photoshop. Any site with multiple steps of interactions or complex filters over search result etc. benefit from SPA and declarative code. The experience is smoother and development of anything, but simple forms is much faster. People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business.

xigoi 3y ago
> People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business. How about people working on a train?
- christophilus 3y ago
  Their experience shouldn’t be much different on an SPA vs an MPA. If they can do an MPA round trip involving a medium-size image, then they should be able to load an SPA.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    SPAs often require an uninterrupted internet connection even if it’s not technically necessary.
    - worthless-trash 3y ago
      Many of them use 'websockets', which break when you have interrupted connectivity.
    - christophilus 3y ago
      That’s not been my experience, but you may be right. Why do they require an uninterrupted internet connection?
      - sergiosgc 3y ago
        Because they break when a request fails. MPAs have a request resubmission UI out of the box. They also have request history navigation, easy resource bookmarking and other stuff you can reimplement in an SPA but usually don't.
      - xigoi 3y ago
        I don’t know. Recently I was viewing an image in the Discord web app and it suddenly disappeared because my device had lost connection, even though the image was already fully loaded in the browser.
    - ryanbrunner 3y ago
      I mean to be fair, MPAs are by definition unusable without a consistent internet connection. By design every meaningful interaction needs to communicate with a server.
      - xigoi 3y ago
        MPAs only need connection when navigating to a new page. It is not needed when reading a page.
- blackoil 3y ago
  For most scenarios, the experience should be better with a well-designed SPA as while first load may be slow, and person may have to wait a min. Once loaded data transfer per interaction is much smaller. For a use-case of just loading a page reading it and submitting few fields on it, will be worse. But for complex things like multiple filtering, searching for different dates, seat selection it will be faster.
  - ryanbrunner 3y ago
    One difference is that server interactions on a MPA are usually more predictable. I can wait for a good internet connection to submit a form or click a link. On top of that, I'm using browser navigation to navigate a lot of the time, and while it's not impossible to provide good feedback about interactions in a SPA, many sites don't (or worse, use optimistic UI updates without handling failure states well so it's impossible to tell what's persisted and what's not).
t8sr 3y ago
This attitude is the reason why I now dread filling out any random web form, because a poorly implemented crappy JavaScript ”flow” will take over my browser, break the back button, accessibility and autofill features and randomly fail and start over in step 6 out of 19. It’s the reason why a simple web form requires 100 MB of bandwidth to deal with. People working from a train or on data roaming are not a fringe case. They have amounts of bandwidth that, 20 years ago, were enough to serve any complex web experience. It’s not acceptable that we now require more data than is contained in all the books in the library of congress to buy a ticket on Ticketmaster. I can’t understand how someone looks at the ratio of useful action to code size, sees it’s something like 1:1e6, and thinks this is fine. The modern web’s usability, efficiency and reliability are terrible, and worse each year. Defending the tech stack that led to this with “it’s a good UX” is both wrong and makes me feel like web devs live on another planet from the rest of us.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > It’s the reason why a simple web form requires 100 MB of bandwidth to deal with. I have a hard time taking these arguments seriously because they get so exaggerated on HN. I’ve done a lot of work from flights and extremely low bandwidth, high latency connections in foreign hotels. Not once have I encountered anything like a web form taking 100MB.
  - t8sr 3y ago
    Two weeks ago, I let my partner use my data roaming to submit two forms on some Adobe collaboration thing, reply to a chat message on Teams and send an email. The counter on my phone said these actions used about 500 MB of bandwidth in the space of about 20 minutes. I agree it sounds exaggerated, but I don’t think it is. This is kind of my point, it’s past the point you would think likely.
ryanbrunner 3y ago
Stuff like filtering search results is very easily accomplished by a MPA with query parameters to a results page. The specific elements that allow you to specify query parameters often require more interactivity, but this is easy to layer on with a progressive enhancement type approach on top of a fundamentally MPA application.
- jasode 3y ago
  >Stuff like filtering search results is very easily accomplished by a MPA with query parameters to a results page. But the "MPA to another results page" causing an HTML reload with a flickering blank screen is a jarring UI experience. The issue isn't what's "easy" to implement. Instead, users prefer a fluid and responsive UI. An example of a website that has superfast filters in SPA style instead of "MPA results page" is McMaster-Carr: https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/ On that website, when the user changes the categories or filters, the results of items instantly change without the jarring disruption and delay of a new page being loaded. There were several previous HN threads about it. Based on the near-universal praise in the comments of those threads, I don't think converting McMaster architecture to your suggested "MPA search results" would be considered an improvement. : + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 : Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used (bedelstein.com) 1402 points by runxel on Sept 25, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 494 comments + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34306793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34306793 : McMaster-Carr: A refreshingly fast, thoughtful, and well-organized website(https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/) 102 points|jer0me|1 year ago|36 comments + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803857 : McMaster-Carr: Beautifully organized and informational industrial product store(https://www.mcmaster.com https://www.mcmaster.com) 40 points|astrocat|3 years ago|27 comments + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502 : Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com(https://medusajs.com/blog/9-best-ecommerce-ux-practices-with-examples https://medusajs.com/blog/9-best-ecommerce-ux-practices-with...) 322 points|amoopa|1 year ago|167 comments
  - ryanbrunner 3y ago
squidbeak 3y ago
Accessibility workers have to hear rather too much of the "these people aren't relevant to the business" arguments. And while every business has its own concerns and priorities, standards based on exclusion don't belong on the web.
Aurornis 3y ago
> People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business. Satellite internet (even before Starlink) is actually plenty fast for a modern website, as long as delivery is halfway optimized to avoid a thousand round trips. It’s people on mobile phones in 3rd-world countries that suffer the most, but they end up with specially optimized websites and even separate mobile apps if they’re a target market. People who disable JS are virtually non-existent in the real world, outside of bubbles like HN comments. Building technology strategies to cater to this tiny minority is not a good decision.
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  Often times people don't disable JS, networking hiccups and bad JS disable JS.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  > People who disable JS are virtually non-existent in the real world, outside of bubbles like HN comments. Except for all the microbrowsers[0] and crawlers that don't have JavaScript enabled or don't run all the JavaScript bullshit on a page. Building accessible sites that can be used in the widest possible context is good engineering. [0] https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/ https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/

xigoi 3y ago

> People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business. How about people working on a train?

christophilus 3y ago
Their experience shouldn’t be much different on an SPA vs an MPA. If they can do an MPA round trip involving a medium-size image, then they should be able to load an SPA.
- xigoi 3y ago
  SPAs often require an uninterrupted internet connection even if it’s not technically necessary.
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    Many of them use 'websockets', which break when you have interrupted connectivity.
  - christophilus 3y ago
    That’s not been my experience, but you may be right. Why do they require an uninterrupted internet connection?
    - sergiosgc 3y ago
      Because they break when a request fails. MPAs have a request resubmission UI out of the box. They also have request history navigation, easy resource bookmarking and other stuff you can reimplement in an SPA but usually don't.
    - xigoi 3y ago
      I don’t know. Recently I was viewing an image in the Discord web app and it suddenly disappeared because my device had lost connection, even though the image was already fully loaded in the browser.
  - ryanbrunner 3y ago
    I mean to be fair, MPAs are by definition unusable without a consistent internet connection. By design every meaningful interaction needs to communicate with a server.
    - xigoi 3y ago
      MPAs only need connection when navigating to a new page. It is not needed when reading a page.
blackoil 3y ago
For most scenarios, the experience should be better with a well-designed SPA as while first load may be slow, and person may have to wait a min. Once loaded data transfer per interaction is much smaller. For a use-case of just loading a page reading it and submitting few fields on it, will be worse. But for complex things like multiple filtering, searching for different dates, seat selection it will be faster.
- ryanbrunner 3y ago
  One difference is that server interactions on a MPA are usually more predictable. I can wait for a good internet connection to submit a form or click a link. On top of that, I'm using browser navigation to navigate a lot of the time, and while it's not impossible to provide good feedback about interactions in a SPA, many sites don't (or worse, use optimistic UI updates without handling failure states well so it's impossible to tell what's persisted and what's not).

t8sr 3y ago

This attitude is the reason why I now dread filling out any random web form, because a poorly implemented crappy JavaScript ”flow” will take over my browser, break the back button, accessibility and autofill features and randomly fail and start over in step 6 out of 19. It’s the reason why a simple web form requires 100 MB of bandwidth to deal with. People working from a train or on data roaming are not a fringe case. They have amounts of bandwidth that, 20 years ago, were enough to serve any complex web experience. It’s not acceptable that we now require more data than is contained in all the books in the library of congress to buy a ticket on Ticketmaster. I can’t understand how someone looks at the ratio of useful action to code size, sees it’s something like 1:1e6, and thinks this is fine. The modern web’s usability, efficiency and reliability are terrible, and worse each year. Defending the tech stack that led to this with “it’s a good UX” is both wrong and makes me feel like web devs live on another planet from the rest of us.

Aurornis 3y ago
> It’s the reason why a simple web form requires 100 MB of bandwidth to deal with. I have a hard time taking these arguments seriously because they get so exaggerated on HN. I’ve done a lot of work from flights and extremely low bandwidth, high latency connections in foreign hotels. Not once have I encountered anything like a web form taking 100MB.
- t8sr 3y ago
  Two weeks ago, I let my partner use my data roaming to submit two forms on some Adobe collaboration thing, reply to a chat message on Teams and send an email. The counter on my phone said these actions used about 500 MB of bandwidth in the space of about 20 minutes. I agree it sounds exaggerated, but I don’t think it is. This is kind of my point, it’s past the point you would think likely.

ryanbrunner 3y ago

Stuff like filtering search results is very easily accomplished by a MPA with query parameters to a results page. The specific elements that allow you to specify query parameters often require more interactivity, but this is easy to layer on with a progressive enhancement type approach on top of a fundamentally MPA application.

jasode 3y ago
>Stuff like filtering search results is very easily accomplished by a MPA with query parameters to a results page. But the "MPA to another results page" causing an HTML reload with a flickering blank screen is a jarring UI experience. The issue isn't what's "easy" to implement. Instead, users prefer a fluid and responsive UI. An example of a website that has superfast filters in SPA style instead of "MPA results page" is McMaster-Carr: https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/ On that website, when the user changes the categories or filters, the results of items instantly change without the jarring disruption and delay of a new page being loaded. There were several previous HN threads about it. Based on the near-universal praise in the comments of those threads, I don't think converting McMaster architecture to your suggested "MPA search results" would be considered an improvement. : + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 : Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used (bedelstein.com) 1402 points by runxel on Sept 25, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 494 comments + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34306793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34306793 : McMaster-Carr: A refreshingly fast, thoughtful, and well-organized website(https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/) 102 points|jer0me|1 year ago|36 comments + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803857 : McMaster-Carr: Beautifully organized and informational industrial product store(https://www.mcmaster.com https://www.mcmaster.com) 40 points|astrocat|3 years ago|27 comments + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502 : Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com(https://medusajs.com/blog/9-best-ecommerce-ux-practices-with-examples https://medusajs.com/blog/9-best-ecommerce-ux-practices-with...) 322 points|amoopa|1 year ago|167 comments
- ryanbrunner 3y ago

squidbeak 3y ago

Accessibility workers have to hear rather too much of the "these people aren't relevant to the business" arguments. And while every business has its own concerns and priorities, standards based on exclusion don't belong on the web.

Aurornis 3y ago

> People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business. Satellite internet (even before Starlink) is actually plenty fast for a modern website, as long as delivery is halfway optimized to avoid a thousand round trips. It’s people on mobile phones in 3rd-world countries that suffer the most, but they end up with specially optimized websites and even separate mobile apps if they’re a target market. People who disable JS are virtually non-existent in the real world, outside of bubbles like HN comments. Building technology strategies to cater to this tiny minority is not a good decision.

davidmurdoch 3y ago
Often times people don't disable JS, networking hiccups and bad JS disable JS.
giantrobot 3y ago
> People who disable JS are virtually non-existent in the real world, outside of bubbles like HN comments. Except for all the microbrowsers[0] and crawlers that don't have JavaScript enabled or don't run all the JavaScript bullshit on a page. Building accessible sites that can be used in the widest possible context is good engineering. [0] https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/ https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/