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

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260 points gherkinnn | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 13:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.229s | source
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pier25 ◴[17 Nov 24 14:57 UTC] No.42164501[source]▶
> I like to argue that some of the most productive days of the web were the PHP and JQuery spaghetti days

I've wondered if going back to that paradigm would be more productive or not than using React et al.

Plenty of big sites like Amazon or Steam still are made this way. Not exactly PHP + jQuery but rendering HTML on the server and sprinkling some JS on top of it.

Has anyone gone back to working like that?

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1. wwweston ◴[18 Nov 24 03:31 UTC] No.42169495[source]▶
I tacked that direction after my work with early Angular and React sites 2014-2016. It isn’t that I’d never work on an SPA or a site using front-end frameworks like that, it’s that it became very clear to me quickly that they weren’t necessary or particularly helpful for the majority of the sites they were used on (definitely including the sites I was working on, one of which was thrown away entirely months after we delivered it to the client), and how much adoption was resume driven.

I used to assume React solved genuine problems for FB but given ways in which the UX+performance has gotten worse, I’m not even sure about that.

Meanwhile html plus progressive enhancement works fine for the majority of projects I’ve been involved in. Componentization can still be a win but there’s other ways to do it.