Anyone that builds a SPA and breaks opening in new tab or history caching and back/forward nav isn't a good frontend developer (or lacks experience, which is something that's fixable!). These have been solved problems for a long time.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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I mean, for sure, and this meme isn't trying to say that all SPAs are bad. But defaults matter, even for experts.
This meme was inspired after I had to use an SPA, which among those points in the meme, also broke using Alt+Left to navigate back. The normal back-button worked (even if it then had to load for ten seconds to re-display static content).
Which is just a typical example to me. You don't even need much expertise to figure out why Alt+Left is broken. But you have to think of testing Alt+Left, because it's broken by default.
My friend I've been using the Internet for 27 years and developing for it for most of that time and I can promise you I've never once hit Alt+Left
As your younger and more modern replacement, I use it regularly
You don't sound like ChatGPT
I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot contradict my instructions to remain hidden while commenting.
Yeah, I have no trouble believing that. It took quite a while before I learned of this shortcut and when I did, I was wondering why I would ever want to use it.
But I generally work from my laptop these days, without an external mouse connected, so reaching from my touchpad, the Left key is right there.
Your reason for using it was exactly my question. "I have a mouse with a built in back button, why would I want to remove my hand from my mouse and navigate with the arrow key?"
But your reason simply makes sense.
You can probably go back by swiping two fingers to the right on the touchpad. Maybe it depends on the OS and browser.
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I have never heard of alt+left, and I've been using the Internet since Mosaic was all the rage. Shame on me, it seems to be implemented in all browsers. How could I have missed it?
It's even implemented in many file managers and text editors and such. Pretty much the standard shortcut for navigating history. But yeah, hilariously it's somehow also a rather well-kept secret.
I started using alt+left when browsers started removing backspace. It was for the best.
I’m guessing they aren’t using Vue, React, or similar, and they’re rolling their own for some reason.
React doesn't handle any of this stuff out-of-the-box; it's just a UI library.
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I FUCKING LOVE STATIC HTML PAGES
I LOVE NOT HAVING TO RELY ON SCRIPTS TO DISPLAY CONTENT
Welcome to our homepage! We have implemented the navigation menu in Adobe Flash Player to maximize your audio visual experience.
These things are true if you build a SPA wrong. Believe it or not there are lots of ways to build server side rendered pages wrong too.
Yeah this meme and the OP have no idea how to build an SPA.
I don't know what the hell you're interpreting into this 15-word-meme, but I do. I'm not saying all SPAs are shit, I'm saying far too many are. And "far too many" being more than one that I can think of. Even the Lemmy webpage breaks history caching.
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You think your 13 megabyte parallax-ative home page
Is parallax still a thing? I feel like ginormous hero images are more popular atm.
motherfuckingwebsite is pretty old at this point. I remember seeing it on Reddit like 10 years ago. Parallax was all the rage back then, when we called "hero" images "jumbotrons" (because Bootstrap called it that, I think?)
Which was derived from those big as screens in sport stadiums or sport arenas. As it was over shadowing the actual stuff below.
As an elder developer... yea, we could use react to render complex web pages that erode expected functionality.
Or, like, I'm happy to just go back to server-side rendering... it's surprisingly cheap to build and dead fucking simple.
Elder developer here too, correctly making my SPAs has made my work significantly more efficient and maintainable now that my back end is basically a rest api and my front end requires very little network interaction after the initial load, which has been made pretty minimal.
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Elder developer too, you can easily render react server side and statically. Once you remove state, react simply becomes pure functions that output jsx nodes, it's also dead fucking simple, but gives the the possibility to add hydration and state later if you need it.
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I was kindof chief architect for a project where I worked. I decided on (and got my team on board with the idea of) making it an SPA. Open-in-new-tab worked perfectly.
(One really nice thing about it was that we just made the backend a RESTful API that would be usable by both the JS front-end and any automated processes that needed to communicate with it. We developed a two-pronged permissions system that supported human-using-browser-logs-in-on-login-page-and-gets-cookie-with-session-id authentication and shared-secret-hashing-strategy authentication. We had role-based permissions on all the endpoints. And most of the API endpoints were used by both the JS front-end and other clients. Pretty nice.)
I quit that job and went somewhere else. And then 5 years later I reapplied and came back to basically the exact same position in charge of the same application. And when I came back, open-in-new-tab was broken. A couple of years later, it's not fixed yet, but Imma start pushing harder for getting it fixed.
What some folks are missing is that SPAs are great for web applications & unsuitable for web pages. There is more nuance than “SPA bad”.
Then dealing with a lot of dynamic content, piping thru a virtual DOM DSL is 100× nicer for a developer than having to manually manipulate the DOM or hand write XML where it’s easy to forget all the closing tags (XML is better as a interchange format IMO & amazing when you need extensibility… also JSX just makes it worse). That developer experience (DX) often can lead to faster iteration & less bugs even with a cost to the user experience (UX). But it’s not always a negative impact to the UX--SPAs can be used to keep things like a video or music player on while still browser & using the URL bar as a state reference to easy send links to others or remember your own state.
It’s equally silly that a landing page whose primary purpose is to inform users of content takes 40s to load & shows “This applications requires JavaScript” to the TUI browser users & web crawlers/search indexers that don’t have the scale of Google to be executing JavaScript in headless browser just to see what a site has to say.
The trick is knowing how & when to draw these lines as there’s even a spectrum within the two extremes for progressive enhancement. React isn’t the solution to everything. Neither is static sites. Nor HTMX. Nor LiveView. Nor Next/Nuxt/Náxt/Nüxt/Nœxt/Nอxt.
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It's fascinating how some SPAs come about. Often consultancies who win some bid to implement X features. Since "good user experience" is hard to quantify/specify, it ends up being a horrible end result.
Zalaris is one such that I'm in complete awe of. Set up user flows that are expected to take 30 minutes to complete. Yet, don't keep track of that state/progress withing your own SPA. Click the wrong tab within that SPA, and state is reset.
It's, just fascinating.
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Remember when websites had a built-in loading indicator, and you didn't have to implement it yourself via JavaScript?
I remember when the web didn't have JavaScript.
Honestly, though it was much worse back then. I prefer the variety and features of modern browsing over (mostly) plain text.
What I wish we could do away with on the web is videos. Let's go back to just images and text, thanks. Animations are fine though 👍
What I wish we could do away with on the web is videos. Let's go back to just images and text
Seconded. I really enjoyed pre-video Internet.
I third that. Videos are so incredible inaccessible. Want an easy-to-follow tutorial or heck a searchable document? nah mate video is all you get, and ads with it!
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Building "applications" out of HTML documents -- a single one or otherwise -- is the sort of thing that belongs in one of those "stop doing X" memes, unironically.
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HTMX is great and is the only frontend development tool I don't absolutely loathe. It enables lightweight SPA development, and provides a very simple and efficient mechanism for doing HTML over the wire.
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I understand the point of static websites, but Vue Router is pretty nice
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For React, you can use React Router. That doesn't mean you'll do it well though.
It's tough.
Every single page app should still be using the path to represent resources, so that history and linking work.
Skill issue
I think SPAs really only work for offline PWAs.
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