> So when the author says that classic HTML with sprinkled js on top is "easier to develop", I smirk. If it were, developers would not be flocking en masse towards SPAs and the like. Those are gaining traction because they are easier to develop and easier to maintain. Monumentally so.
Let me put it this way, both as a developer and user of SPAs, I have long since observed that SPAs, on average, tend to be much more resource intensive (it's not infrequent that my laptop fans start spinning), buggier, and harder to use. I don't think this is surprising, because "maintaining state" is great and all, but it also means that once that state goes sideways your app goes sideways, too.
Does this describe every SPA? No. Does that mean that every template app is better? No. But is the average SPA app worse than the average template app? In my experience it is (although I will admit I lack empirical data).
I don't think that popularity is a good yardstick. jQuery is clearly not the optimal way to develop web-apps – this post was never intended to argue as such, merely to argue that it's better than vanilla JS that I've seen advocated quite a lot recently – so people go to "alternative" solutions which lacks the problems jQuery has, but that doesn't mean these solutions don't create different problems on their own.
I don't know what the optimal way to develop webapps is, but I do know that the current generation of SPA frameworks isn't it. Probably some sort of hybrid approach, or a completely different one that hasn't been invented yet, is. In the meanwhile, a template-based approach is much easier to understand (less can go wrong), and is probably the best approach for many (though not all) websites.
I have no claims that SPAs are better end-user experiences out of the box. Your quote is about how easy it is to develop and maintain an SPA, not how good users have it after the fact (which entirely depends on how good your team is at building the app).
I'm starting to think I need to clarify that paragraph :/
I inserted the word "often" now: "Those apps are often easier to develop, tend to be faster".
The entire topic is complex, and like I said the main point wasn't about template vs. SPA, although I felt like something had to be said about it, as it's obviously related and something of an elephant in the room.
I don't think there is One True Way™, but I also feel that many apps are actually a lot less complex than people seem to think. For example the main competitor for the app I'm working on now (unpublished MVP that's still WIP) is a SPA, and I feel like my simple template-driven app has a much better UX. You just don't need all the complexity, there is so little benefit you might as well not bother. I think this describes many apps.
Would HN be better as an SPA? I don't think so, and I suspect that a "SPA HN" would be harder to develop and get right.
Probably - "Has it occurred* to you you might simply not understand the advantages of this approach?" makes you sound pretty dismissive of the parent comment's points.
Also - as someone who disagrees with you I don't see any compelling points in things like:
> "So when the author says that classic HTML with sprinkled js on top is "easier to develop", I smirk. If it were, developers would not be flocking en masse towards SPAs and the like. Those are gaining traction because they are easier to develop and easier to maintain. Monumentally so."
You're on HN - there's a huge chunk of us who are attempting to KISS web development. You're not wrong that React and Typescript are wonderful tools - but they're absolutely not the only way to develop things.
Also you may want to address people's worries about SPA development if you want to convince people it's not as bad as they're saying. (like performance - which is a huge reason I keep my light-weight vanilla-style apps the way they are)
I think there's a canyon between outright calling an approach "madness" and simply… understanding its advantages, yes.
Performance is a concern, and that's one of the main reasons why serverside rendering is being adopted as a technique. So when OP berates the existance of SSR, I have to wonder if they understand the larger picture. If it's rude for me to point this out, I apologize for being rude; my point still stands, though.
I don't think the SPA approach is the end-all-be-all but I'm definitely happy to have adopted it for my current project (a mid-size web app mixing classic list views and a few more complex bits and pieces here and there). Had I done it with jQuery, I'd still be building it; and had I done it in my classic hybrid approach, I would not have as many options as I currently do when building new pages/views.
I think you need to clarify as well, because if someone tells me it is easier to maintain solution X than solution Y I naively expect it must be because solution X's users will have it better than solution Y and complain less, requiring less fixing of user experienced problems.
Do you have an example of a “template app” that has anything even close to the actual feature complexity of an average SPA? Unless you control for that, I’d be willing to guess that the difference in bugginess is simply due to SPAs having a more complex set of features.
> Do you have an example of a “template app” that has anything even close to the actual feature complexity of an average SPA?
How about rewritten apps like reddit, that's as like for like as you can get? There are a bunch of apps/categories (things like JIRA) that were once template style and are now SPA style, the SPA version are nearly always worse.
Let me put it this way, both as a developer and user of SPAs, I have long since observed that SPAs, on average, tend to be much more resource intensive (it's not infrequent that my laptop fans start spinning), buggier, and harder to use. I don't think this is surprising, because "maintaining state" is great and all, but it also means that once that state goes sideways your app goes sideways, too.
Does this describe every SPA? No. Does that mean that every template app is better? No. But is the average SPA app worse than the average template app? In my experience it is (although I will admit I lack empirical data).
I don't think that popularity is a good yardstick. jQuery is clearly not the optimal way to develop web-apps – this post was never intended to argue as such, merely to argue that it's better than vanilla JS that I've seen advocated quite a lot recently – so people go to "alternative" solutions which lacks the problems jQuery has, but that doesn't mean these solutions don't create different problems on their own.
I don't know what the optimal way to develop webapps is, but I do know that the current generation of SPA frameworks isn't it. Probably some sort of hybrid approach, or a completely different one that hasn't been invented yet, is. In the meanwhile, a template-based approach is much easier to understand (less can go wrong), and is probably the best approach for many (though not all) websites.