[ivan_gammel]

>A spotty connection hasn’t loaded the dependencies correctly - Either they load or they don't. How would the dependencies load "incorrectly"?

Let‘s say you have 5-7 dependencies to load, but 3 of them timed out because your train entered the tunnel. Your app ends up in incorrect state, fails silently and UX degrades unpredictably. This is where the conversion often drops visibly and the reason SSR is now a go-to solution for any marketing website.

[jazzypants]

Why am I loading dependencies from 5-7 places? Why is my website not using a bundler if it has so many varied dependencies? Why do we not expect the user to understand that they are in a tunnel without internet?

Regardless, this isn't really restricted to the usage of JavaScript. The website would likely have pretty bad UX if only half of the CSS loaded correctly, but no one programs defensively around it being absent.

[ivan_gammel]

Have you ever developed an enterprise scale frontend applications optimized for conversion targets? It feels like you have not. You may ship your own code in a bundle, yes. All integrations come on top of that. That chatbot, tracker, A/B testing logic etc - all are loaded separately from your service provider CDN.

An user opening a web page is not expecting a full-blown app with multi-second loading times. If that happens, they bounce, and you loose revenue. Web is supposed to have very short time to first content paint and very short time to interactive, the shorter, the better, less than 0.5s is the goal. It can deliver that, if built properly. Many SPAs, bulky JS apps are built this way for developer convenience, not for end users. The only real use case for SPA is when you deal with a lot of local data. A spreadsheet, document or image editor, a diagram tool (but then wasm is probably a better choice).

You may say, you are not building enterprise grade frontend. But if you are small enough, you don’t need SPA either.

[jazzypants]

Go on. How do I have no idea what I'm talking about? Why is it okay for a website to break simply because the analytics don't load? Why do you think that's good design? How is my personal, lived experience less valuable than yours?

Is it just that you're ashamed that you have made such poorly designed web apps that can't handle a few broken HTTP calls?

Is it just that you can't simply accept that JavaScript is a requirement for the modern web which is what this entire discussion is hinged upon?

[ivan_gammel]

>How do I have no idea what I'm talking about?

You dismissed A/B testing as unnecessary. That is sufficient for this judgement. A/B tests mostly run on the happy path scenario of a customer: An A/B test breaks, the company is losing money at light speed.

The loading-related issues overall may eat 0,5-1% of the revenue. It is not something that should be an afterthought.

[jazzypants]

Lol, okay. I didn't know that every single customer was going to go through a tunnel as they loaded the page.

I didn't dismiss A/B testing. I'm just saying that, if the analytics don't load on the client, you should already have A loaded and ready to render. It's literally just a matter of a try/catch, and you shouldn't be waiting to load this stuff on the client-side anyways if this is truly supposed to be the "Happy Path".

Yes, I know that legacy software like Google Tag Manager requires client-side integration, but I would argue that is an orthogonal concern. You don't need to use that for your A/B testing. It's pretty easy to integrate this stuff into SSR-- especially if you stream in the HTML. This is why cookies exist.

And, again, none of this changes the central concept of this comment thread: JavaScript is necessary for the modern web experience.

[jazzypants]

> chatbot, tracker, A/B testing logic etc

Literally none of those things are necessary for a working website. If your site breaks when your analytics don't load, then that's just horrible design at any scale.

[ivan_gammel]

Apparently you have no idea what are you talking about.

[nchmy]

A normal person would immediately think "dang, page didn't load before I entered the tunnel. Guess I'll wait til I'm out again and refresh".

And if they're deliberately going somewhwre where there's no signal for an extended period of time, and really want it to work, they'll ensure they've loaded everything before doing so.

And I say this as someone who is developing a pwa that is for people with low end phones and very inconsistent and/or connections. I'm very cognizant and empathetic to their situation.

[ivan_gammel]

Anecdotal evidence does not beat statistics and user research. Bounce rate has inverse correlation to loading speed. People with low intent do not refresh, they simply don‘t come back and look elsewhere or just move on. Telling you this as someone who built first commercial website in 1999 and was a hyperscaler B2C startup CTO. Let‘s not measure the length of credentials.

[nchmy]

To clarify, you're saying we should be jumping through convoluted hoops - full page navigation + js to rewrite history, all so that you can avoid a very minimal amount of js to show/hide a nav menu - for low intent people who are frequently entering tunnels?

Something like Datastar would enable this with like two html attributes, and only require 10kb of js (and would also allow for endless other things via declarative html).

https://data-star.dev/reference/attributes#data-show

[ivan_gammel]

> To clarify, you're saying we should be jumping through convoluted hoops

Good that you are asked. Did I say anything like that in my comment above?

[nchmy]

That's certainly what you implied, given the chain of comments.