XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

Ok, so it might be a long shot, but I would say that

1. the browsers were inconsistent in 1990-2000 so we started using JS to make them behave the same

2. meanwhile the only thing we needed were good CSS styles which were not yet present and consistent behaviour

3. over the years the browsers started behaving the same (mainly because Highlander rules - there can be only one, but Firefox is also coping well)

4. but we already got used to having frameworks that would make the pages look the same on all browsers. Also the paradigm was switched to have json data rendered

5. at the current technology we could cope with server generated old-school web pages because they would have low footprint, work faster and require less memory.

Why do I say that? Recently we started working on a migration from a legacy system. Looks like 2000s standard page per HTTP request. Every action like add remove etc. requires a http refresh. However it works much faster than our react system. Because:

1. Nowadays the internet is much faster

2. Phones have a lot of memory which is wasted by js frameworks

3. in the backend all's almost same old story - CRUD CRUD and CRUD (+ pagination, + transactions)

AJAX and updating DOM wasn't there just to "make things faster" it was implemented there to change paradigm of "web sites" or "web documents" — because web was for displaying documents. Full page reload makes sense if you are working in a document paradigm.

It works well here on HN for example as it is quite simple.

There are a lot of other examples where people most likely should do a simple website instead of using JS framework.

But "we could all go back to full page reloads" is not true, as there really are proper "web applications" out there for which full page reloads would be a terrible UX.

To summarize there are:

"websites", "web documents", "web forms" that mostly could get away with full page reloads

"web applications" that need complex stuff presented and manipulated while full page reload would not be a good solution

> full page reloads

grug remember ancestor used frames

then UX shaman said frame bad all sour faced frame ugly they said, multiple scrollbar bad

then 20 years later people use fancy js to emulate frames grug remember ancestor was right

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Classic frames were quite bad. Every frame on a page was a separate, independent, coequal instance of the browser engine. This is almost never what you actually want. The header/footer/sidebar frames are subordinate and should not navigate freely. Bookmarks should return me to the frameset state as I left it, not the default for that URL. History should contain the frameset state I saw, not separate entries for each individual frame.

Even with these problems, classic frames might have been salvageable, but nobody bothered to fix them.

> Every frame on a page was a separate, independent, coequal instance of the browser engine. This is almost never what you actually want.

Most frames are used for menu, navigation, frame for data, frame for additional information of data. And they are great for that. I don't think that frames are different instances of the browser engine(?) but that doesn't matter the slightest(?). They are fast and lightweight.

> The header/footer/sidebar frames are subordinate and should not navigate freely.

They have the ability to navigate freely but obviously they don't do that, they navigate different frames.

With a frameset page:

History doesn't work right

Bookmarks don't work right -- this applies to link sharing and incoming links too

Back button doesn't work right

The concept is good. The implementation is bad.

Yup, they are not enough for an SPA, not without javascript. And if you have javascript to handle history, URL, bookmarks and all that, you can just use divs without frames.

This has nothing to do with SPAs.

Take the POSIX specs linked in a sibling comment.

Or take the classic Javadocs. I am currently looking at the docs for java.util.ArrayList. Here's a link to it from my browser's URL bar: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/

But you didn't go to the docs for java.util.ArrayList, you went to the starting page. Ok, fine, I'll link you directly to the ArrayList docs, for which I had to "view frame source" and grab the URL: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/ArrayLis...

Ok, but now you don't see any of the other frames, do you? And I had one of those frames pointing at the java.util class. So none of these links show you what I saw.

And if I look in my history, there is no entry that corresponds to what I actually saw. There are separate entries for each frame, but none of them load the frameset page with the correct state.

These are strongly hyperlinked reference documents. Classic use of HTML. No JavaScript or even CSS needed.