[littlecranky67]

I partly agree with you, but it is a design decision that comes with a drawback. A URL /todos/123 cannot be resolved in a SPA in a hard-reload. I.e. if a user were to bookmark /todos/123 or press reload in the browser, the browser would ultimately ask the underlying HTTP server for that file. As you mentioned, you would need a 404 page configured to fetch that - but that requires a configuration in the HTTP server (nginx etc.). So you are not just a static html+js+css+images deploy, you always will need server support. Another issue is, that 4xx errors in the HTTP spec are treated differently than 2xx: most notably, browsers are NOT allowed to cache any 404 responses, no matter what response header your server sends. This will ultimately mean, those /todo/123 bookmarks/hard-reloads will always trigger a full download of the page, even though it would be in the cache. And again, you would always need support in the web server to overwrite 404 pages. While the current NextJS output can be just deployed to something like github-pages or other webspace solutions.

Now, these are just the limitations I can think of, but there are probably more. And to be fair, why "break" the web this way, if you can just use query params: /todo?id=123. This solves all the quirks of the above solution, and is exactly what any server-side app (without JS) would look like, such as PHP etc.

[degamad]

> if a user were to bookmark /todos/123 or press reload in the browser, the browser would ultimately ask the underlying HTTP server for that file. As you mentioned, you would need a 404 page configured to fetch that - but that requires a configuration in the HTTP server (nginx etc.). So you are not just a static html+js+css+images deploy, you always will need server support.

> use query params: /todo?id=123. This solves all the quirks of the above solution, and is exactly what any server-side app (without JS) would look like, such as PHP etc.

We had PATH_INFO in virtually every http server since CGI/1.0 and were using it for embedding parameters in urls since SEO was a thing, if not earlier. Using PATH_INFO in a PHP script to access an ID was pretty common, even if it wasn't the default.

By way of example, here's a sample url from vBulletin, a classic PHP application <https:/ /forum.vbulletin.com/forum/vbulletin-sales-and-feedback/vbulletin-pre-sales-questions/4387853-vbulletin-system-requirements>[0] where the section, subsection, topic id, and topic are embedded into the URL path, not the query string.

[0] https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/vbulletin-sales-and-feedba...

[teekoiv]

Interesting. You can set up the server to respond with 200.html as the catch-all so the requests would return 200. There was some issue with it—can't remember what—which is why I switched to 404.html. After the initial load though the subsequent navigations would go through pushState so I think they'd be cached.

But I don't see this is as big of a problem. With this I can switch and choose—SSR dynamic pages or use hacky catch-all mechanism. For any reasonably large site you probably would SSR for SEO and other purposes. But for completely offline apps I have to do zero extra work to render them as is.

Personally, I much prefer route paths vs query parameters not just because they look ugly but because they lose hierarchy. Also, you can't then just decide to SSR the pages individually as they're now permanently fixed to same path.

[littlecranky67]

I tend to agree that you could come up with a solution using server-side catch-all and custom 200/404 routes - and actually I do, as I use nginx with a single line of try_files customization. But this is optional. It shouldn't be required to mess with the server config, if you want a static deployment.

Besides, if you catch-all to a 200.html page, how would you serve 404s? Yes, you can integrate a piece of JS in the 200.html file and have it "display" 404, but the original HTTP response would have been 200 (not 404). A lot of bending web standards and technology, and I can see how framework authors probably decide against that. Especially given how much shit JS frameworks get for "reinventing the wheel" :)

[teekoiv]

It doesn't really matter from user's point of view if the response is 200 or 404 if the end result is the same. This is just a rendered web page after all. But yeah, you can get stuck in the semantics of it but I personally just use what works and move along.