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Honest question, what's wrong with SPA?
by vilmosi 11y ago
Honest question, what's wrong with SPA?
- alanh 11y agoThe author write and linked to an article on the downsides. While I haven't read it, I do rage every time I click on a link to a Blogger.com-hosted article and watch some fucking Blogger logo animating as they load a web app to show me some static text. There’s no need for anything to load before showing me the blog page. The experience has been degraded and made more fragile, not enhanced.
- mod 11y agoNothing's really wrong with SPAs (they have benefits and drawbacks). What's wrong is making a blanket statement that "every web app" should be one. Also you're trying to draw a fine distinction between web apps and websites, which could be another discussion altogether, probably with no big agreement on where to place the line.
- vilmosi 11y agoSorry, didn't mean to sound like I was making a blanket statement. I agree there's a fine line between web app and website. No-one should take the decision of using an SPA lightly.
- matt_s 11y agoGiven that the vast majority of end users are not techie - what value does SPA add to an end user of a web application?
- vilmosi 11y agoInteractivity mostly. Imagine if Google Maps reloaded every time you zoom in or pick a location.
- alanh 11y agoGoogle Maps is famous as a pioneering use of AJAX, not as an SPA. Whether it is or is not an SPA at present is largely immaterial. There are many ways to create interactive experiences without full-page reloads, and going full SPA is just one route.
- vilmosi 11y agoSorry, I'm a bit confused about the difference between an Ajax powered page vs an SPA
- matt_s 11y agoAJAX and the ability to manipulate the DOM has been around for about a decade or so, AJAX came out of Microsoft I believe. Putting bits of AJAX into a web app doesn't make it SPA. Lets say you have a CRUD web application that is tax forms which end up being 5-10 "pages" printed. Then as a SPA you would have to load all the code to generate the 5-10 pages of forms, validation, logic, etc. onto a Single Page. This single page would be where everything is done, the URL would not change and the end user would have a seamless experience. If the goal is interactivity and seamless operation to the end user, attempting to mimic a desktop app, there are multiple paths to achieving that goal. Limiting the design to a single page seems sort of contrived and a "do it because I can" type of approach, absent of user requirements - in my opinion.
- 11y ago
- snarkyturtle 11y agoIf people disable JS or if it fails for whatever reason, you'll be left with an unusable site. If fonts don't load or if css doesn't load, at least you still have html and you could read what's on the screen. With JS you won't even be able to navigate to pages since it all gets handled with js. That and it often has more to load than your traditional html/css page, which means a less pleasant experience on slower connections (mobile).
- woah 11y agoNot true if you use a decent framework.
- snarkyturtle 11y agoIf your framework just saves up json like most SPA's, your pretty much SOL unless you do non-js fallbacks, but that's boring and tedious ;)