
Ask HN: Anyone getting sick of all the 'web apps'? - CM30
Or at least, attempts to make simple content based websites work more and more like apps?<p>Because it seems every site that&#x27;s gotten a &#x27;redesign&#x27; in the last year or so seems to have become some clunky, awkward to use &#x27;app&#x27; like thing with dynamic content loading where simple text would do just fine.<p>Reddit&#x27;s annoying enough like this (thank you mobile &#x27;loading&#x27; screen for every page), but then you&#x27;ve got stuff like Wikia where it seems every single page is loaded via AJAX. Then breaks horribly because it gives me 404 errors 9 times out of 10.<p>Do these companies not realise how awkward these new designs are to use? Or that if you&#x27;re not making a social media site, your site doesn&#x27;t need to load like one?
======
joekrill
I'm going to go against what appears to be popular opinion and suggest that
this reeks of a "back in my day..." complaint.

There's always been poorly-written software, poorly-created websites, bad UIs,
bad UX, etc. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. Suggesting that the
entire web is devolving into a vat of poor decisions is, I think, a bit
alarmist. Technology changes, things progress, sometimes things get slightly
worse before they get better. But I think, on the whole, things are moving in
a good direction. And we'll always be able to pick out a few bad examples to
justify why the sky is falling. But in the end, I much prefer the current
state of affairs to the way things were a decade ago.

~~~
birksherty
"I much prefer the current state of affairs to the way things were a decade
ago"

It's what the developers say. Every developer has latest macbook, works on a
shiny new office with AC with all the bandwidth and gadgets. And they think
people all around the world also has the same thing.

Whereas lots of users don't care about the AJAX loading. Users want websites
to be fast and less annoying. But, developers only care about latest hot
frameworks even though that will make things slow for users.

Newest Youtube redesign is the same. It consumes more cpu and way much slower
than the previous one. I know because I don't have a high end laptop and
100mbps internet. It does not matter because Google employees use all the
latest gadgets.

~~~
technofire
> Users want websites to be fast and less annoying.

Well, pulling some JSON via AJAX and updating a small part of the page is
faster than reloading the entire thing.

~~~
pwinnski
You would think so. I mean, that's obvious, right?

And yet websites are slow. That's not just "get off my lawn" crankiness,
either. We're now downloading multiple megabytes, and things are rendered via
javascript late in the process, so we start seeing content later than we used
to, and we get the final render later than we used to.

Modern websites are largely slow and annoying, a topic that has come up many,
many times--with benchmarks--on HN.

~~~
threatofrain
Is JS the problem though? For really heavy apps, sure, but many people
consider 1 MB to be a good upper threshold for bundle sizes.

I think the biggest culprit over the web, the thing that makes me hesitant as
a mobile user to visit websites willy nilly, is media content, such as images,
sound, and video. Many websites look empty without media, so people splatter
at least a few things on there, as do advertisements, and I think that's
easily a few MB.

I also think the biggest resource that people are consuming nowadays,
including well-to-do people with iPhones, is not CPU, RAM, or even battery
resource, but mobile data limits.

~~~
twobyfour
But why are we loading even 1MB to display 2K worth of text?

~~~
threatofrain
If people only wanted 2 kb text pages, it'd be a different story. But rich
media is often what people want, so it makes even an information lookup on
native Yelp expensive. Once you bring in rich media, 1 MB of JS is very minor,
and JS can be used to optimize your rich media downloading.

~~~
twobyfour
Sure, but why do I need that crap on pages without rich media? And why do I
need to wait for my browser (since it's on a computer other than the latest
model iMac) to spend 20 seconds rendering that mess of JavaScript before I can
view that content (text OR rich media), when it could display vanilla HTML
faster than I can blink?

~~~
tarboreus
I'm with you. You'll frequently see news stories with 3-5 MB of junk to
augment a < 50 kB piece.That's more information than all of published human
writing before 1800. Sorry, but that's stupid, and looks bad. Yes, a good
chunk of that is ads, but a lot of it is loading all of two versions of
bootstrap so you can use one class and similar silliness.

------
dudeoutthere
Yesterday I was thinking about the same issue that OP outlined. I tend to
agree that all the SPA hype and all the additional levels of abstraction on
top of HTML+JS+CSS need to go in favour of lightweight readable dead-simple
sites, this is what the web is meant for in the end. For apps we have apps.

Imagine this. You know you can script JS in photoshop. So someone comes with
the "brilliant" idea and solution of making apps by scripting PSDs. Suddenly
all the rage comes and every dude out there boasts his new psd-app development
skills on their resumes. And everyone forgets that the JS right there in
Photoshop is for PSD scripting, not for making apps. Same here - CSS is for
styling HTML documents. JS is for making documents a bit more interactive
(think, "click that button to view some visualization"). The web environment
was not made for apps and it shouldnt have apps developed on it.

~~~
hellofunk
> I tend to agree that all the SPA hype and all the additional levels of
> abstraction on top of HTML+JS+CSS need to go in favour of lightweight
> readable dead-simple sites, this is what the web is meant for in the end.
> For apps we have apps.

I kind of disagree. The web is no longer about a single consistent form of
content. You have sites. And you have web apps. They are not the same thing.
When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, "I write web apps." They
often say, "oh, cool, I've been looking for a web designer." I say, "no, I
don't really do web design for web sites, I build software applications that
run on a web page." So maybe the world isn't entirely used to the concept yet,
but that doesn't mean there isn't a valid separation. A web app should not be
like an informational web site, and vice versa. But that doesn't mean one
should disappear. That's up to designers to understand, not really for users
to understand.

~~~
scandox
This is a true description of the current situation. Question is: is it a good
situation?

I feel like the web is a really poor paradigm for many apps. Especially
business apps where users can be trained to use a more complex but more
efficient interface. The web drives us all to create "universal" style
applications that anyone can use more or less without training. Which is grand
for the public but I think really backwards inside organisations.

~~~
tylerjwilk00
I think the situation we are in with the web proves that the distribution
system with the lowest friction and that allows points of friction to be
smoothed out in iterations over time will win.

~~~
pdimitar
But the friction in Web apps is _not_ smoothed out. It only becomes worse.
More and more megabytes of JS that nobody knows the purpose of -- or if they
do, they are bummed as to why must they be 1.5 MB minified.

Also, HTTP 2.0 fell victim to too much pressure for backwards compatibility.

Things aren't improving.

------
dalore
I'm going to go against the tide of opinion and say a good app done well does
add to the user experience. And what really constitutes an 'app'? Does the
voting up/down experience in hackernews constitute an app because it doesn't
refresh the page? A site can have varying amount of dynamic content so there
is no hard line.

When it's done wrong, yes it's a poor experience and is most likely done for
doing it sake. With no thought to the UX experience or performance. Twitter
using hash urls for the first time was one.

But if you design it from a UX and performance perspective it can work well.
Especially if you allow it degrade gracefully.

For example Google maps, or Google docs etc. But also stuff like a search app
like airbnb.com.

An app can have better performance then pure html pages as when you transition
you can have it smoother, and only load the differences. It can improve
interaction as the whole page isn't cleared and then refreshed.

Google is recommending going this way for web performance
[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/p...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/prpl-
pattern/)

I think in this thread we are only remembering web apps that have gone
horribly bad, like reddit for example. But we don't remember it when it just
works

~~~
pdimitar
> _Especially if you allow it degrade gracefully._

Has not been my experience. I did an experiment once -- two weeks without any
JS on my Firefox. Tried to open everything in there first.

I did not count totals for the 9 days I was able to endure but I did count
medians and I can tell you that only 1 in 50-60 websites had _any_ form of
graceful degradation. And most of the time it wasn't graceful at all...

Sounds good in theory but it is definitely not happening in practice, is what
I am saying. Businesses view it as too much expense.

------
sago
This too shall pass (said with fingers crossed).

Single Page Apps For the vast majority of content are such a horrible user
experience, I have to believe the backlash will be swift and severe. They will
be condemned to the bad ideas pile with table based layouts and Flash sites,
with the latter, they share a lot of similarities.

But despite my confidence, I confess I've been mystified why they ever took
off at all. They seem so clearly an impedance mismatch with the kind of
static-ish content the web is really rather good at, I didn't expect them to
take off the way they have. I understand fashion, and I understand when SPAs
might be useful, but still. Why? (a genuine question).

~~~
cousin_it
Because animated transitions make the manager proud.

~~~
hellofunk
I hope you're not serious. When we talk about an SPA, we're not talking about
how it _looks_ or _animates_. We're talking about functionality, really.

~~~
cousin_it
I am 100% serious, speaking from two decades of webdev experience for >10
employers. When people advocate SPAs, they usually talk about responsiveness
to the user, increased engagement and other such things, but the true
underlying reason is always the same and it's exactly what I said. Hard page
reloads make the manager feel like their product is janky. Animated
transitions make the manager proud. Every manager.

------
taneq
Getting sick of all the bloat and dynamic-for-dynamic's-sake designs,
definitely. Also getting sick of companies using "cloud computing" etc. as a
smokescreen to justify siphoning your data off into their servers for analysis
and resale when they could easily do the processing locally.

~~~
DamonHD
Our 'app' runs on a radiator valve (!) and absolutely our design / privacy
philosophy is that we can do a decent job without data leaving the radiator,
noticeably better if we can share it within the house, and only after that and
with consent, a little better still with some 'cloud' help!

[https://www.earth.org.uk/OpenTRV-demo.html](https://www.earth.org.uk/OpenTRV-
demo.html)

I generally think apps on phones are a poor deal for security and reliability,
so there is scope for using browsers as a portable virtual machine for all but
the most critical/local of services. I was thinking this this morning before I
noticed the HN story!

So, I like my _pages_ to be clean and small, and I'd like Web _apps_ to be
distinct and reliable, and in some cases work off-line to avoid the need for
walled-garden native code.

------
tyingq
Enjoy what you have now. Soon enough blogs will be rendered via WASM onto a
canvas bitmap using a full embedded UI something like QT.

~~~
hamandcheese
That capability actually sounds pretty darn cool to me.

~~~
ckastner
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

~~~
hamandcheese
And just because you shouldn’t doesn’t mean it’s not cool.

------
deerpig
I'm seeing that some of this is being driven by web developer shops who are
telling clients that this is how things must be done. I was sent a 600MB chunk
of crud today to be hosted that required a full lamp stack to build a web app
that could have been done very nicely by a four page static site that worked
well on mobile. This is has insane. These design shops (not all) don't care
about building sites that help their customers, they only want to produce eye-
candy that they think makes their portfolios look cool.

~~~
dabockster
> they only want to produce eye-candy that they think makes their portfolios
> look cool

You got it. I'm finishing up a contract for one such firm that loves to use
Wordpress for _everything_ when 9/10 of their sites could be better served by
static HTML pages and better CSS. But no, that's soooooo last decade, so the
users get a Wordpress/Sass can of worms that requires entire LAMP and Node.js
stacks to operate properly.

I was thinking about rebuilding my portfolio site in a "responsive framework",
but decided against it when I realized I can achieve the same effect with
static HTML and separate CSS files for each page.

------
alex_suzuki
There was an article recently on HN with a clickbaity title "It's time to kill
the web" but its core argument was that HTTP is a document delivery protocol
and not meant for building applications, and I think that is the main reason
why we are seeing an explosion of frameworks and poor app quality.

[https://blog.plan99.net/its-time-to-kill-the-
web-974a9fe80c8...](https://blog.plan99.net/its-time-to-kill-the-
web-974a9fe80c89) HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15321015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15321015)

(I am NOT the author)

------
jondubois
The real problem is that demand for websites and web apps has grown faster
than the supply of skilled developers who can build them properly.

As a developer who can build both traditional multi-page websites and single
page apps, I'd rather build single page apps from both a development
productivity and UX perspective.

As a developer, when you get used to building web apps, it's just faster
especially if you're a full stack developer.

------
electrotype
I work at a place where our websites should _definitely_ be about informations
and accessibility. But the pression to use SPAs in order to "be cool" is so
strong, almost nobody questions this decision.

Most seem to think that if you are not using Angular/React/etc, you are doing
it wrong, you live in the past. But the large majority of our websites could
_easily_ be plain HTML + some Javascript to spice everything!

I'm still a very big fan of progressive enhancement and of sites that do work
when javascript is disabled, even if they are then not as pretty.

------
pwg
> Do these companies not realise how awkward these new designs are to use?

No. Because if they did, they might not make the changes.

Much of this is likely driven by 'marketing' where there was/is a miss-belief
that if the site is not using the newest whiz-bang tech it will see reduced
"engagement".

But what the marketers can't fathom is that people come to the site for the
sites content, not the sites technology stack.

~~~
andrenotgiant
So you're saying marketers can't "fathom" basic concepts about content, but
are also technically competent enough to be the decision-makers when it comes
to the technology stack?

If that's the case these marketers should quit and get jobs as developers,
they'll get paid more.

~~~
xxs
I guess the marketing merely go to conferences and have their heads trivially
washed up with the newest buzz stuff. See our numbers are tumbling and X is
doing that (cool new site design), coincidence?

Also it doesn't help that developers also tend to love doing new stuff,
exploring and all.

~~~
libertine
Marketing builds brands, manages products, distribution, CRM and
communication.

Branding and communication go beyond reacting to numbers - it's getting a
strategic vision and develop it in a way your customers relate to.

From what I've read I don't know what kind of marketing people you guys are in
touch with... my god.

------
mattmanser
Reddit's mobile page is frustratingly technically incompetent, especially as
if you switch to desktop it works instantly.

~~~
falcolas
It’s telling that their mobile experience starts with an advert to “Try the
app, it’s better!”

------
dustingetz
Monetization - content websites turned into apps because the business is data
collection.

Much of the code running in these apps bypasses engineering and source
control, it is injected into the page by services like
[https://segment.com/](https://segment.com/) and handled by Marketing, not
Engineering. So you see cases where the app works great on dev machines and in
prod loads 20x slower.

------
gaius
_Do these companies not realise how awkward these new designs are to use? Or
that if you 're not making a social media site, your site doesn't need to load
like one?_

They have been bamboozled by so-called "full stack developers" who want to add
the latest trendy "framework" to their CVs. Customers are alienated,
shareholders money is squandered, and managers who let this happen are asleep
at the wheel

------
eli_gottlieb
I've been sick of web-apps since they became a thing. We should have built
nicer visual designs on some weird combination of Delphi and X11 or something
vaguely like that.

~~~
mmjaa
I've been sick of web-apps since they became a thing, too.

And for sure, I've stopped even learning web technologies, as they are more
hassle than they're worth - just as much cognitive load as it takes to build a
native app, with none of the benefits.

So, I build native apps. And if I need it to be cross-platform, I target SDL
and OpenGL with a single GUI library that works the same, everywhere.

It means I never have to read a single line of CSS ever again, and .. I like
that! A lot! Plus, all my apps run everywhere, and always look exactly the
same - my users like that too!

~~~
eli_gottlieb
What sort of GUI library/libraries are you using?

~~~
mmjaa
Depends on the use case, but generally right now it goes like this: if it can
be done as a high-density Games/Games-like GUI or some kind of interactive
media/content display, which 99% of modern apps are: I use MOAI. If it has to
be a Business GUI with normal looking things for whatever platform: Haxe. If
its a quick tool for lab/workshop: libUI.

These approaches all have their pluses/minuses too, of course, but I have
found that by exercising platform chops, the workload is minimal once the
homework is done.

I find it utterly pleasant to code something up in Lua, ship the bins to the
devices directly, and see the same thing on every machine. Even between libui
and MOAI projects there are chances to share data - i.e. use a lab tool
written in libUI to generate content consumed by the game engine...

Its like the web, only completely the opposite: you're not targeting someone
else app (the web client), but rather running your own client (app).

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I think I may have to learn Haxe. Which MOAI are you referring to? The library
I found was a mobile-games engine.

~~~
mmjaa
MOAI SDK: [https://github.com/moai/moai-
community](https://github.com/moai/moai-community)

MOAI DEV: [https://github.com/moai/moai-dev](https://github.com/moai/moai-dev)

Warning: some effort is required, but .. once you get the hosts running on all
platform targets (Win/MacOS/Linux/iOS/Android/&etc.), the true value shines
and cross-platform nirvana can be attained. Bonus points for having
Hanappe/Flower and/or whatever else involved as a 'higher layer' UI management
abstraction on top of the GL pipeline ..

------
JohnStrange
I'm not using web apps at all. To be honest, I thought they were a fad and am
amazed that they are still deemed successful and trendy. I haven't seen a web
app so far that would even remotely match a corresponding desktop application
in terms of quality and features. But I guess times are changing and people
are happy with less quality, as long as its shiny and new.

Most web apps violate basic user interface design and don't even have working
keyboard shortcuts. And let's not get started on user-definable menus,
arbitrary undo, re-ordering of interface elements, scripting, and other
advanced features.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to sound negative and to each his own. I
personally don't use a web app for mail and have found absolutely zero use for
any other web application I've tried so far.

~~~
pdimitar
> _Most web apps violate basic user interface design and don 't even have
> working keyboard shortcuts._

I am extremely saddened this comes up less and less.

An ancient accounting office where you can do EVERYTHING with F1-F12 and a
bunch of other shortcuts, written in 1993, is more advanced in terms of UX
compared to most web apps.

------
coldtea
I'm sure sick of anything web-based that's not a form app (for which the web
works fine -- e.g. ticket purchasing, taxes, posting, etc) -- of course
regular content presentation websites are OK too.

E.g. web-based bitmap editors, web-based IDEs, web-based audio editors, web-
based file management, etc.

------
snomad
One question I have - should we keep building apps in the document model (http
/ https), or finally create a true static document model and add a separate
app layer?

I can't believe after 2 decades that browsers are still missing so many native
elements - date pickers, menus, flyouts - how many of those have been written
for the web?

------
alien_at_work
I've never liked them from the beginning. HTTP/HTML/CSS were created for
making static documents. The problem is convenience. Convenience for users,
convenience for developers.

For users, now even for me, if I go to a web site to do something that seems
simple and they say "do you want to download our app?" I feel my tempature
rise a bit. No, I don't want to give you a foothold on my phone/computer I
just want to do this simple thing this instant while downloading nothing.

The developer case is worse: platform GUI development goes from complicated to
horrendous. And if you've done it for one you've done it for none of the other
platforms. What was needed here was for everyone to understand MVP (model-
view-presenter), implement most of their logic in model and presenter layers
and then only have the V as a thin, platform-specific bit that presented the
content to the user. Instead we either got Swing (a run-everywhere library
that looked exactly the same everywhere and fit in nowhere) or these lowest-
common-demonitor "native" frameworks which _looked_ ok but often missed key
functionality on various platforms. So they were either really ugly or really
complex. And this was, IMO, a result of poor design processes: the GUI's were
written such that business logic was hopelessly engangled with GUI/View code.

So the web basically gave us a kind of Swing where it _did_ fit in. So the web
became a favorite GUI framework. But it wasn't designed to be a GUI framework
so it was terrible at it [1]. But still, it was perceived to be easier than
native (and indeed, it had advantages: much harder to embed business logic in
your view because the view is written in a completely different, non-turing-
compliant language) so people were happy to use it. Including doing insane
things like trying to run OpenGL in the browser so they could have 3D games
there (making the browser nothing more than an app delivery mechanism) or even
people asking for an OS that is just a browser.

I don't know how things will turn out, but at least if WebAssembly gets
popular maybe I'll at least be spared dealing with the insult to engineering
known as JavaScript.

[1] Some people don't get this. In this very thread there is someone asking
why there are no "native" components like date pickers and so on...

------
koonsolo
At least Flash developers already realized that Flash was not meant for
content delivery.

It seems that the HTML5 proponents still need to learn that lesson.

HTML for content, plugins for rich media. I never saw a problem with that. But
I'm probably getting old.

~~~
ainiriand
You are not getting older, (in fact you are getting older) it is just that the
http protocol was never designed for this and we are paying the price. I find
your approach very rational, it is something that was lost in time.

------
jarym
There used to be a time when SPAs were meant for real web-apps (as in, things
like the Admin area of your PayPal account) and everything else lived happily
as website pages.

Yes, I am tired of everyone trying to shoehorn everything into an SPA. It
shows developers who want to jump onto the hype-wagon without always thinking
if the problem they're solving is appropriate for it.

------
throw2016
The lack of self awareness is glaring. This is pushed entirely on sites like
HN with endless hype and resume driven development.

There is nothing wrong with hype. The big problem is anything new avoids
proper scrutiny by forcefully marketing what it seeks to replace as 'obsolete'
and criticism as anti-change. If its by a big player people latch on hoping to
consult or acquire employable skills and the din by vested interests becomes
incessant and scrutiny by lone voices can be ignored.

This is used consistently on HN to push bad ideas aggressively until its too
late, and the fact that rarely does this meet technical scrutiny early on
suggests a missing technical depth in discussions.

~~~
pdimitar
I mostly agree with you but you're being too harsh on HN. It barely influences
anything at all.

The problem you outlined does exist -- but it's forced by marketing teams and
vested interests, not by a bunch of tech enthusiasts. HN's influece amounts to
a drop in the sea.

------
holydude
One reason I see is that there just is not enough of good enough content and
people seem to want to obscure things just because they want to hide the fact
that there is not anything worth checking / consuming.

------
tarboreus
The reality is that that lightweight or even hand-coded apps and sites are
faster, more semantic, and easier to maintain, and often look less cookie-
cutter. But you don't get hired for knowing how to create a great web app with
HTML, CSS, a server-side language, and a little JS or jquery for flavor. You
get hired for becoming an "expert" in something that has only been around 2.5
years and is at the inflection point in the hype curve. What you're seeing is
the result of resume-driven development.

------
redleggedfrog
Yup, and then you lose me to some other site.

The two things that annoy me the most having the page change layout as it
loads (often causing me to click on something different than I was aiming at)
and lack of responsiveness. Having the UI baked into an environment that was
never designed for it makes the apps anemic and slow.

Google is the worst at this, where they take perfectly fine and usable desktop
app (say Picassa) and then replace it with some janky, feature deficient, "web
app."

------
twobyfour
The trouble is that developers have great tools for building actual web
applications. You know, things like Trello or Google Docs or whatever that are
actual _software_ hosted in the browser.

They love their tools, and they aren't making the distinction between software
and _content_.

So they're trying to use the hammer of application development frameworks to
attach the zip-tie of content, which is better accomplished with a different
tool.

And it sucks for the user. It sucks hard.

------
hypertexthero
Yes, and for quite a long time.

I think the excessive complexity often comes from imitating techniques in
projects that are solving problems for different audiences at larger scale.

As an old-school web designer, I recommend Jeremy Keith’s Resilient Web Design
— [https://resilientwebdesign.com/](https://resilientwebdesign.com/) — to
anyone who wants to make a good, fast, future-proof website.

------
kimi
Amen brother. Unless we want to talk about "apps" in general that - in 95% of
cases - could be mobile-optimized web sites.

------
erikb
lol. It is just in the process of getting worse. Soon you'll have "all the
container apps", developers even more removed from the actual administration
and even less ability for you to interact with what other people do.

On the positive side though: In 10 years you won't hear much about "web apps"
anymore.

------
retube
btw, [http://www.reddit.com/.compact](http://www.reddit.com/.compact) is a far
superior mobile UX than their official mobile site (and make sure you click
"No" to the banner enticing you to try their mobile site when you first land)

~~~
nathcd
You can also access it from [https://i.reddit.com/](https://i.reddit.com/).
The problem is there are so many inter-reddit links throughout comments,
sidebars, wikis, and submitted links that you usually end up getting booted
into the newer interface at some point.

------
sebpmtl
Well, if you look at the declining numbers of downloads for native apps
yearly, you can see why big companies would want to switch to progressive web
apps eventually. Web components and the focus on components in a framework
like Vue.js make sense in terms of UI. I think the tooling has a lot to do
with the spreading of the concept of the SPA also.But I agree, a lot of sites
are jumping on the bandwagon and shouldn't. You look at a site like
Craigslist, that never changed and it still is a piece of art /s Anyways, I'm
just a noob so my opinion is worth shit... As a sidenote, working with webpack
and vue.js is amazing (no, I'm not a hipster...)

------
criddell
Web apps never feel right to me because they are so obviously not _of_ the
platform. I get the same feeling from some cross platform widget toolkits.
Yes, the application may be cross platform, but it doesn't feel native
anywhere.

------
cm2012
Reddit's mobile website is objectively worse than their desktop website on
mobile.

~~~
partisan
LinkedIn is horrible as well. Their chat feature (on mobile web) is unusable.
The Send button goes further and further down the screen as you type until it
disappears... permanently. No amount of refreshing will bring it back. They
took the app paradigm and ran with it until they created a broken website when
in fact, a single textarea and a button would have sufficed.

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bsaul
I don't think the "graphical design" aspect should be the only factor to
consider (at least for the general trend, not for wikia in particular). SPA
issues should be balanced with the horror that server-side session data is.
Trying to rebuild the client-side state every time after each answer.

From a programming model POV, having the server only spit the necessary data
for the new info required, and not the whole set together with GUI data, is a
real simplification. Not to mention the fact that it is already the
architecture you need for the other types of client (mobile and native desktop
app).

~~~
cabalamat
> the horror that server-side session data is

Whast is horrible about this?

~~~
bsaul
Well, for once it means resending over and over the same information on every
page, it's just a waste of bandwidth. Then it makes sharding the server more
complicated, because you need to make sure the request goes to the correct
server (or you have to use a special DB just for that such as redis).

For things as simple as form validation, you need to resend the values that
the person entered in case the form didn't validate. Then you end up
piggybacking informations from one page to another in hidden type form
fields...

If that doesn't sound crazy to you, then you should probably write "native"
application again, it will remind you how simple life is when your client has
the right to use its memory.

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nathannael
I believe there's gotta be a middle ground. Web Apps (and Progressive Web
Apps) should be treated as the new standard because they take the best part of
web and enhance it with patterns and features that we already know works
thanks to mobile. Now, I agree that most implementations are very bad and need
to be improved. I think the whole "javascript framework" situation is getting
very close to total mayhem and I hope somebody will figure out a way to create
web apps that have both functionality and simplicity to user and developer

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herbst
I agree the mobile Reddit is awkward to use and a horrible experience. However
i dont think this is a very big issue. Sure everything started to look like
Bootstrap in the last years, but IMO most people did it right without making
UX worse.

Afaik most modern websites load every single request with Ajax (often through
things like Turbolinks) but it feels so passive that nobody would ever bother
complaining. Also it always perfectly falls back.

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bromuro
No, in my experience such websites are faster to navigate.

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romanovcode
You are correct, but it is not because of concept itself but rather because of
lazy implementations.

For example:

Back-end renders page and something crashes - you get 503 error and you know
to refresh the page or contact support or w/e.

Shitty web-app loads multiple components via AJAX, doesn't even check for
errors, some components do not load, you have no idea what the heck is
happening so all you can do is inspect the JSON response in the devtools.

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turowicz
Pushing UI rendering to client side and other "rich client" properties stress
the servers less, so it's an advantage for the app provider.

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halayli
Generally web apps perform better because you load the app once and it gets
cached by the browser. The ajax calls to get content reduces the data that you
need to transfer. It also forces you to create APIs and reuse them and on the
frontend side it provides much more flexibility to modularize and reuse
components compared to the clunky widget interfaces available in server side
frameworks.

404s are irrelevant to the fact that the site is using an web app or not. 404s
exist for the longest time and they're as common in both cases.

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mcrowson
kids these days

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jordan801
I see a lot of folks complaining, but the reasoning is completely blown out.
"I hate spa's because they have a 50 mb library behind them". Honestly I'd
like to see an example of that.

I haven't built a static website since 2005 and I seriously don't get all the
contempt for spa's or dynamic sites. Horrible user experience? Maybe for those
who grew up on static designs. If you do them right, which isn't even hard,
they should be a much better experience, since you're not loading all the
content at once.

Maybe I don't understand because there's a bunch of gripping and not a lot of,
"here's why it sucks". Other than, "the web was intended to support static
sites". Yeah, and computers were built strictly for scientists, so stop using
yours. :)

~~~
mattmanser
A SPA generally has to initialize and hook everything up.

If you're being even more trendy and have turned your entire back end into an
API, you then have to wait for the javascript to compile, wait for the intial
document complete javascript call, post off for the data, wait for the data,
run a render and finally display what the person wants.

On your dev laptop with 16 Gb and multi-core and a local database and web
server, that's fast.

For all your users, it's not.

And all that for what? In the context of this discussion, maybe a fancy user
menu that could have been written in a couple of kb of raw javascript by
someone with more than a couple of years of dev experience that would take a
millisecond to compile and run compared to the 500ms-20s of having to wait for
something like React or Angular or Knockout or whatever.

