The myth that you can’t build interactive web apps except as single page app

I wonder why the article doesn't mention utilizing the browser cache for your static CSS and JS assets instead of introducing a service worker as first measure.

Few years ago I built a shopping site MPA this way and the page transitions were almost not noticable.

Especially since the `stale-while-revalidate` and `immutable` Cache-Control directives are well supported nowadays.

Stale-while-revalidate: see https://web.dev/articles/stale-while-revalidate & https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...

Immutable: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8246 & https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...

And if using a CDN, `s-maxage` (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...) is quite useful. Set it to a long time, and purge the CDN cache on deploy.

  Immutable

is what you need. Crazy enough, Chrome has not implemented it. Bug open since 2016: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41253661

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EDIT: appears that Chrome suddenly had decided in 2017 to not validate at all on reload anymore, after Facebook had complained to Chrome devs about Chrome being more a drag on their servers compared to other browsers.

To be fair, it’s because Chrome handling of a soft reload is different from Firefox or Safari, and does not lead to revalidating (let alone refetching) assets files. See https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/reload-reloaded-faster-and...

Quoting https://engineering.fb.com/2017/01/26/web/this-browser-tweak...:

> We began to discuss changing the behavior of the reload button with the Chrome team. […] we proposed a compromise where resources with a long max-age would never get revalidated, but that for resources with a shorter max-age the old behavior would apply. The Chrome team thought about this and decided to apply the change for all cached resources, not just the long-lived ones.

> Firefox was quick in implementing the cache-control: immutable change and rolled it out just around when Chrome was fully launching their final fixes to reload.

> Chrome and Firefox’s measures have effectively eliminated revalidation requests to us from modern version of those browsers.

I just wrote my edit before I saw yours. Must have been a cache problem :)

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” — Phil Karlton (cf. https://www.Karlton.org/2017/12/naming-things-hard/ or https://MartinFowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html)

;-)

And off by one errors