HACKER Q&A
📣 jcmontx

Do you consider SPAs to be a superior user experience?


During the last years I've come to hate SPAs over traditional server side websites. Perhaps it is not the SPAs fault, but the lack of good quality ones.

The lack of proper feedback to interaction, the loading skeletons and sometimes the failed API calls that leave everything loading for ever. Also, the poor performance when loading for the first time. Do you think web development is going in the right direction with the massive adoption of SPAs?

  👤 the_angry_angel Accepted Answer ✓
I was until even a few years ago still in the camp of progressive enhancement. I'm now accepting that you really do need Javascript and you cannot get around it. It does bother me that we've swung so far towards SPAs.

Beyond deeply dynamic webapps, such as ERPs/line of business apps, and the very few that really do need offline mode, I think server rendering in conjunction with javascript is the right path.

What that looks like in today's world I have mixed feelings about.

Phoenix's (Elixir) LiveView (which is now being duplicated in as Livewire in PHP) is an interesting take and certainly fills a gap, but I'm getting that feeling of jQuery era where markup is peppered with magic attributes. And equally it doesn't address all use cases (which is fine).

We're certainly in an age of experimentation.