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by adamddev1 439 days ago
But then we lose the ability to do anything offline. Offline web apps are still valuable. Some people want to turn their data off sometimes. Many people live in places where internet access is spotty.

I also love the simplicity of SSR/vanilla web for some things. But I say keep offline-first SPA/PWAs alive. Cross-plaftorm. Freedom from the app stores. Freedom from needing to be tied online all the time.
4 comments
adamddev1 439 days ago
When you have a website that needs to be always accessed online, absolutely, give us an old-fashioned SSR vanilla web experience. Just give us a page WITH ALL THE DATA that loads in half a second. Don't make us wait for 5 seconds with spinners and placeholders while you make the client fetch data itself from different sources. This is insanity and torture! People are using client side rendering for the wrong things.

But there are good and powerful use cases for client side rendering.

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bob1029 439 days ago
> I say keep offline-first SPA/PWAs alive.

I have no problem with the properly offline-capable apps using standards compliant web technology. I've been championing the use of PWAs to circumvent the iOS App Store for years.

To be very specific, the problematic solutions in my view tend to be those right in the middle of pure SSR and pure client. They aren't sure if they are always online or offline by default and the actual customer use cases don't seem to have been fully explored.

Did you ask the customer if a ~150ms form post to us-east-1 from their main office would be something they'd even care about? Why not? You could save an unbelievable amount of frustration if they don't care. It would take 10 minutes to set up a demo they could try if you think it's going to be a deal breaker at delivery time.

I've not once worked with a B2B customer in the banking, insurance, finance, manufacturing or retail domains who raised a concern about any of this. Only nerds on the internet seem to fantasize about the customer getting outraged at a browser navigation event or a synthetic browser benchmark score.

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adamddev1 438 days ago
I agree. I think it would nice to have basically two tracks, either fully SSR or fully client. I think if they researched what really irritated customers it would be the 2-4 seconds of staring at spinners and placeholders that has become normal. Now we've got instant feedback for browser events but brutally slow load times for our pages to fill out.
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nkrisc 439 days ago
Freedom from browsers - I'd rather have an executable I can run.
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LegionMammal978 439 days ago
Yeah, sites demanding a roundtrip for every small interaction can be a pain to use when traveling. The principle I'd wish more web devs would keep in mind is, "Just because the client managed to contact your server once doesn't mean it will have fast and easy access to it in perpetuity." Indeed, in my experience, too many roundtrips is the cause of most atrociously slow websites, regardless of how heavy or light a framework they use.
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