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Introducing Enhance Music — Begin Blog

I also think the number of situations in which an SPA architecture can be recommended is dwindling, chiefly due to how good the web platform has become (and how much better it’s getting every day). And because so much of the rest of the ‘struggle stack’ (transpilers, unique dialects, etc.) was built to get around gaps in the web platform that no longer exist, the use cases for these tools is dwindling in tandem.

This is good news: not only can we avoid piling up transient knowledge about a seemingly endless stream of dependencies, we can also eject from the routine stress of those dependencies changing or breaking under our feet and throwing wrenches into our workflows — all while delivering more robust and performant websites to end users.

Why multi-page apps? | Go Make Things

There are absolutely use-cases for SPAs (media sites, primarily). Most of the other things we use them for make the user experience notably worse or band-aid over the real underlying issues without addressing them.

Web Developer Ground Hog Day | Go Make Things

JavaScript is great. I love using it, and it does amazing things. But maybe it’s time we stop repeating these same patterns of development over and over again. Maybe we can use JavaScript more responsibly, and focus more effort on HTML and CSS.

Rich Harris: Hot takes on the web 🌶️ - YouTube

I don’t agree with all of these takes-of-varying-spiciness, but Rich Harris is always worth paying attention to.

Defaulting on Single Page Applications (SPA)—zachleat.com

This isn’t an opinion piece. This is documentation.

You can’t JavaScript your way out of an excess-JavaScript problem.

Why I’m not the biggest fan of Single Page Applications - Manuel Matuzović

I guess the biggest criticism here is that it feels like people who believe in the superiority of single page applications and the entire ecosystem focus more on developer experience (DX) than user experience. That sounds like a dangerous blanket statement, but after all these years, I never had the feeling that the argument “better DX leads to better UX” was ever true. It’s nothing more than a justification for the immense complexity and potentially significantly worse UX. And even if the core argument isn’t DX, other arguments like scalability, maintainability, competitive ability, easier recruiting (“everyone uses React”), and cost effectiveness, in my experience, only sound good, but rarely hold up to their promises.

We’re all trying to find the guy who did this

Imagine the web is a storefront, React is a hot dog car, and here’s Create React App dressed as a hot dog:

HTML is the cornerstone of the web — so why does creating a “React app” produce an empty HTML file? Why are we not taking advantage of the most basic feature of the web—the ability to see content quickly before all the interactive code loads? Why do we wait to start loading the data until after all the client-side code has finished loading?

The transitional web | Go Make Things

I’ve smelt the same change in the wind that Chris describes here—there’s finally a reckoning happening in the world of JavaScript frameworks and single page apps.

Why We’re Breaking Up with CSS-in-JS | Brad Frost

I’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth many times over my years building on the web. I too feel like there’s something in the air right now, and people are finally acknowledging that most single page apps are crap.

But Brad makes the interesting point that, because they were incubated when profligate client-side JavaScript was all the rage, web components may have ended up inheriting the wrong mindset:

So now the world of web components has egg on its face because the zeitgeist at the time of its design didn’t have such a strong focus on SSR/HTML-first/ progressive enhancement. Had web components been designed in the current zeitgeist, things would almost certainly be different.

I don’t care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps – Baldur Bjarnason

The problem I’ve regularly encountered in my work is that I don’t get to do my job the way I think is best for both me and my employer or client. The employer, who isn’t the web development expert, almost always has a clear idea of what real web development is supposed to look like: Single-Page-Apps and React (or React-like frameworks).

An intimation that it wouldn’t be the right solution for this particular problem is taken as an admission of incompetence.

I’ve experienced this. And I think this observation is even more true when it comes to recruitment.

10 Years of Meteor

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:

1. 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.

SPAs: theory versus practice | Read the Tea Leaves

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying things, I propose that the core of the debate can be summed up by these truisms:

1. The best SPA is better than the best MPA.
2. The average SPA is worse than the average MPA.

The balance has shifted away from SPAs | Read the Tea Leaves

I’ve got the same hunch as Nolan:

There’s a feeling in the air. A zeitgeist. SPAs are no longer the cool kids they once were 10 years ago.

And I think he’s right to frame the appeal of single page apps in terms of control (even if that control comes at the expense of performance and first-load user experience).

How to make MPAs that are as fast as SPAs | Go Make Things

The headline is a little misleading because if you follow this advice, your multi-page apps will be much much faster than single page apps, especially when you include that initial page load of a single page app.

Here’s a quick high-level summary of what I do…

1. Serve pre-rendered, mostly static HTML.
2. Inline everything, including CSS and JavaScript.
3. Use mostly platform-native JavaScript, and as little of it as possible.
4. Minify and gzip all the things.
5. Lean heavily on service workers.

That’s an excellent recipe for success right there!

SPAs were a mistake | Go Make Things

Browsers give you a ton of stuff for free, built right in, out-of-the-box. SPAs break all that, and force you to recreate it yourself with JavaScript. Most developers do it wrong, and for the ones who do it right, it results in a ton of extra code to recreate features the browser already gave you for free.

The Single-Page-App Morality Play – Baldur Bjarnason

I keep seeing Single-Page-Apps with huge JS files that only, in terms of concrete User Experience (UX) benefits, deliver client-side validation of forms plus analytics. Apps rarely leverage the potential of a Single-Page-App. It’s still just the same ‘click, wait for load’ navigation cycle. Same as the one you get with Multi-Page-Apps. Except buggier and with a much slower initial loading time.

When you look at performance, cross-platform and mobile support, reliability, and accessibility, nearly every Single-Page-App you can find in the wild is a failure on multiple fronts.

Replacing those with even a mediocre Multi-Page-App is generally going to be a substantial win. You usually see improvements on all of the issues mentioned above. You get the same general UX except with more reliable loading, history management, and loading features—provided by the browser.

Before you dismiss Baldur as a hater based on what I’ve just quoted, you should really read the whole article. The issue he points to is not with the technical architecture of single page apps, but with management.

Single-Page-Apps can be fantastic. Most teams will mess them up because most teams operate in dysfunctional organisations.

A lot of what he says really resonates with me. Over and over again I’ve seen projects where the technical decison around which monolithic client-side JavaScript framework to use has been made even before a problem has been defined.

Baldur’s conclusion chimes a lot with what I’ve been saying in conference talks this year: the biggest challenges facing the web are not technical in nature.

The biggest hindrance to the web’s progress isn’t non-expert developers, tooling, libraries, Single-Page-Apps, or Multi-Page-Apps.

It’s always humans.

Two articles on SPA or SPA-like sites vs alternatives — Piper Haywood

On framework-dependency and longevity:

So it’s not even so much about being wary of React or Vue, it’s about not making assumptions, being cautious and cognizant of future needs or restrictions when proposing a tech stack. Any tech stack you choose will ultimately become a ball-and-chain, not just those based on JavaScript frameworks. It’s just that the ball can sometimes be heavier than it needed to be, and you can anticipate that with a little foresight.

Full bleed layout using simple CSS | Kilian Valkhof

A follow-up to full-bleed layout post I linked to recently. Here’s how you can get the same effect with using CSS grid.

I like the use of the principle of least power not just in the choice of languages, but within the application of a language.

CSS Grid full-bleed layout tutorial · Josh W Comeau

When you’ve got a single centered column but you want something (like an image) to break out and span the full width.

You probably don’t need a single-page application

If there are no specific reasons to build a single-page application, I will go with a traditional server-rendered architecture every day of the week.