[dylan604]

I understand where you're coming from, but I came from 90s webdev. The gift of aysnc requests was the one true credit I give MS for their contribution to moving the web forward (even if it might have been self-serving). The fact that we no longer had to do full screen refreshes to update one part of the page was glorious. It helped allow the deprecation of frames.

However, just like all good things, people decided if a little is good more would be better. This is why we can't have nice things, but it doesn't mean that the thing itself isn't nice.

[nitrogen]

This goes back to the distinction between web pages/documents (deliver immutable server-side content once, up front) and web apps (lots of back and forth with mutable data on the server). A news website should never be anything except pages, even with interactive content, but it seems almost nobody can resist the urge to treat everything like an app.

[dylan604]

Not every website is a news site, nor is every non-newsite an app. Having a website that functions as a store front and information page so that 90% of the site is static, yet dynamically being able to add things to a cart is an example. Is that an app? But not having to do a full page refresh on a POST to add an item to a cart is glorius.

Just because the webiste in question of this thread is a newsite doesn't mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater because it fits this one category.

[djbusby]

I like to think of my App as a collection of Pages. While it does "stuff" we think of implementation Page first.

Then clients say your app is fast and responsive but what they really mean is that we've not built an obese chimera.