While I’ve always been bothered by the downsides of SPAs, I always thought the gap would be bridged sooner or later, and that performance concerns would eventually vanish thanks to things like code splitting, tree shaking, or SSR. But ten years later, many of these issues remain. Many SPA bundles are still bloated with too many dependencies, hydration is still slow, and content is still duplicated in memory on the client even if it already lives in the DOM.
Yet something might be changing: for whatever reason, it feels like people are finally starting to take note and ask why things have to be this way.
Interesting to see a decade-long perspective. I especially like how Sacha revisits and reasseses design principles from ten years ago:
- Data on the Wire. Don’t send HTML over the network. Send data and let the client decide how to render it.
Verdict: 👎
It’s since become apparent that you often do need to send HTML over the network, and things seem to be moving back towards handling as much as possible of your HTML compilation on the server, not on the client.
2010 was quite a year:
And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.
Nothing’s been quite the same since.
I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.
Oh, how I wish that every team building for the web would use this sensible approach!
I’m very excited about this proposal for animating transitions between web pages!
I’m less excited about doing it for single page apps, but I get why it’s the simplest place to start.
This builds on Jake’s earlier proposal which I always thought was excellent and much needed. I’m not the only one. Chris agrees.
I have to agree with John here:
There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.
There’s absolutely no technical reason why it should be this way around. This is a cultural problem with “modern front-end web development”.
Lots of new features landing in Safari, and it’s worth paying attention to the new icon requirements now that websites can be added to the dock:
To provide the best user experience on macOS, supply at least one opaque, full-bleed
maskablesquare icon in the web app manifest, either as SVG (any size) or high resolution bitmap (1024×1024).
It’s fine to require JavaScript for read/write functionality. But have you considered a read-only mode without JavaScript?
Apple’s policy of locking browser updates to operating system updates is bad for the web and bad for the planet.
Progressive enhancement: it’s not just for web sites, y’know.
A performance boost in Chrome.
Performance sluething.