I suspect that, in 2-3 years, server-side rendering is going to be rediscovered as a cure for the plague of spaghetti frontend code, just as current template-in-javascript metalanguages are being discovered now as a cure for spaghetti frontend-plus-backend-rendered code.
>I suspect that, in 2-3 years, server-side rendering is going to be rediscovered as a cure for the plague of spaghetti frontend code,
Maybe your prediction is informed by different internet usage scenarios but for general mainstream web surfers, I can't see how the industry will migrate back to server-side rendering in 3 years.
The unavoidable technical issue is the round-trip latency of the network. The same delays from the speed-of-light will still be there in 3 years. Most of the world is accessing the web through mobile phones which has worse latency than desktops. Server-side rendering (which means painful page reloads) is user hostile on slow network connections.
You didn’t mention all of the new features coming to HTTP 2 that will alleviate network performance issues (prefetch, multiplex connections, etc.)
I’ve found many sites that use frameworks like react to be much more user hostile, particularly from a performance and accessibility standpoint. The reddit redesign comes to mind. It’s so much slower now than it used to be on a browser (perhaps they’re intentionally doing this to push people to their mobile app), that it’s noticeably reduced the quality of the experience.
I guess I just don’t understand how people see page reloads with proper caching as unacceptable from a performance standpoint compared some JavaScript app maintaining a virtual DOM, which is also likely regularly communicating with a server.
Same with TechCrunch, every time I visit I am reminded how frustrating react sites can be compared to server rendered pages with all the flicker, slow page reveal, and odd navigation it introduced.
To close an article there is a x button and back swipe is disabled. I agree that flicker is introduced by Javascript. That is what I was saying. Might be ok for an app, but a content driven site seems like it should stick to the concept of pages where navigation is like turning a page. Just seems like server rendering fits that mental model better. Not sure why react even makes sense for a blog.
It doesn't, but blogs aren't built to present content they're built to sell advertisements and collect data. That's much easier with an SPA than a SSR app.
they're built to sell advertisements and collect data. That's much easier with an SPA than a SSR app
How easier? By dint of additional JS that an SSR doesn't have/need? Not sure how pulling a header nav (or any cell/element) from a server on pageload plays into that, but even today I've watched sites (plural) loading, pushing loaded parts all over the page for 30sec until everything settles down. Maybe blogs aren't quite so affected by this set of popular dark- and anti-patterns, but even so the post is almost always the last thing to load. Presumably, the monetization and data collection takes precedence over all else.
I believe in a mix of these two. It's going to be server rendered JS app that will download itself on the background and install itself as a PWA. The best of both worlds.
So parallelism after one initial slow load is the cure all? I also propose that front end will rediscover that parallelism is hard and isn't always the best fit.
I don't think so, at least not for the kinds of apps I build. My biggest problem is largely around interactivity -- shuffling lots of data back-and-forth between the client and the server. If I'm going to have a SSR app with lots of AJAX code running on the client, I might as well just go all-client.
Isn't that use case just to save time on initial load? An SPA with SSR for load times is different from a webapp structured to have logic mostly in the server.
