[Slartie]

> Oh and web apps of the era were slow. Like, dog slow. However bloated and crappy the reddit app is, the old Slashdot site was slower, even on broadband.

Just those that attempted to realize every minuscule client side UI change by performing full page server side rendering. Which admittedly were quite a few, but by far all of them.

The better ones were those that struck a good balance between doing stuff on the server and on the client, and those were blazingly fast. This very site, HN, would probably qualify as one of those, albeit a functionally simple example.

SPAs are just a capitulation in the face of the task to strike this balance. That doesn't mean that it is necessarily the wrong path - if the ideal balance for a particular use case would be very client side heavy (think a web image editor application) then the availability of robust SPA frameworks is a godsend.

However, that does not mean it would be a good idea to apply the SPA approach to other cases in which the ideal balance would be to do much more on the server side - which in my opinion applies to most of the "classic" types of websites that we are used to since the early days, like bulletin boards, for example.