[yellowapple]

> There is a time and place for SPA (mail is a great example). But using them in places where the page reload would load in completely new content for most of the page anyways? That's paying a large cost for no practical benefit; and your users are paying some of that cost.

Yep. It's bonkers to me that a page consisting mostly of text (say, a Twitter feed or a news article) takes even so much as a second (let alone multiple!) to load on any PC/tablet/smartphone manufactured within the last decade. That latency is squarely the fault of heavyweight SPA-enabling frameworks and their encouragement of replacing the browser's features with custom JS-driven versions.

On the other hand, having to navigate a needlessly-elongated history due to every little action producing a page load (and a new entry in my browser's history, meaning one more thing to click "Back" to skip over) is no less frustrating. Neither is wanting to reload a page only for the browser to throw up scary warnings about resending information simply because that page happened to result from some POST'd form submission.

Everything I've seen of HTMX makes it seem to be a nice middle-ground between full-MPA v. full-SPA: each "screen" is its own page (like an MPA), but said page is rich enough to avoid full-blown reloads (with all the history-mangling that entails) for every little action within that page (like an SPA). That it's able to gracefully downgrade back to an ordinary MPA should the backend support it and the client require it is icing on the cake.

I'm pretty averse to frontend development, especially when it involves anything beyond HTML and CSS, but HTMX makes it very tempting to shift that stance from absolute to conditional.

[PaulHoule]

I remember writing high complexity rich internet applications (knowledge graph editors, tools to align sales territories for companies with 1000+ salespeople, etc.) circa 2005. It was challenging to do because I had to figure out how to update the whole UI when data came in from asynchronous requests, I had to write frameworks a bit like MobX or redux to handle the situation.

Even before that I was making Java applets to do things you couldn't do with HTML, like draw a finite element model and send it to a FORTRAN back end to see what it does under stress, or replace Apple's Quicktime VR plugin, or simulate the Ising model with the Monte Carlo methods.)

What happened around 2015 is that people gave up writing HTML forms and felt that they had to use React to make very simple things like newsletter signups so now you see many SPAs that don't need to be SPAs.

Today we have things like Figma that approach the complex UI you'd expect from a high-end desktop app, but in many ways our horizons have shrunk thanks to "phoneishness" and the idea that everything should be done with a very "simple" (in terms of what the user sees) mobile app that is actually very hard to develop -- who cares about how fast your build cycle is if the app store can hang up your releases as long they like?