Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by onion2k 2234 days ago
Very few SPAs give proper user feedback. There could be any number of silent errors in the background.

Badly built apps that ignore errors and don't work well for users are certainly not limited to SPAs, and blaming SPA tech for that seems a bit unreasonable.
1 comments
TeMPOraL 2234 days ago
For "classical" websites, it was not possible to screw it up. The feeback was always there - clear, unmistakable, universal across sites. Boom, "No Internet", site's gone. Press "back" to get the previous state and click again/resubmit later. And it was nice that you could actually do that - use the "back" button to revert to the last correct state even without an Internet connection. Can't do that with almost any SPA these days.

I suppose it just boils down to the fact that with more freedom comes more freedom to fuck things up. But when you see an industry systematically fucking things up, and being driven by economic incentives that encourage fucking things up, one has to wonder whether some of those freedoms should be taken away.

link
onion2k 2234 days ago
The feeback was always there - clear, unmistakable, universal across sites.

It wasn't clear for lots of users. There were common stories of people getting a connection error and refreshing a page only to find their order on an ecommerce site had been taken twice, or that a comment they'd made had been submitted a second time, or that a request to delete something had actually worked but the second request threw up an error because it couldn't be deleted again so it looked like it had failed. These aren't so much of an issue today because browsers warn about form resubmission, but let's not forget that server-side rendered websites in the past were absolutely riddled with UX problems and bugs.

That's not a defence of SPAs, far too many still get the basics wrong, but if you believe it was better when devs made "classical" sites I think there's some decidedly rose-tinted nostalgia going on.

link
onemoresoop 2233 days ago
Yes. And want to add that links are not links anymore.. They look like links but cannot be copied..
link