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Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? (video, 19m)
- Talk by Rich Harris, creator of Rollup and Svelte, for Jamstack Conf.
- He explains what a Single Page App (SPA) is, then starts off critical. “SPAs are terrible because”:
- Bloated JS framework, complex tooling, poor performance.
- It will be buggy. Expectations of the web are broken, e.g. CMD + Click should open links in new tabs, but often won’t work in SPAs.
- Accessibility issues: focus management, scroll management, navigation announcements, etc.
- Less resilience. Rich shares a webpage he often points people to when they assume that everyone has JavaScript. It is a long flowchart of all of the reasons why JS may not load for someone. Rich also points out that these users are underrepresented in analytics, because analytics typically require JS to run.
- But then he highlights the benefits:
- SPAs allow you to do things you can’t do ‘natively’, e.g. transitions between pages.
- Only need to load third party scripts once, whereas multi-page apps (i.e. the traditional server-rendered sites) have to at least evaluate the JS on each page load, even if the scripts themselves are already cached.
- Single codebase of JS (rather than 1 for client, and 1 for server, which may be, for example, PHP).
- Rich proposes a new direction for the web, and coins the term “transitional apps” (from “transitional design” in the interior design industry), which are apps that take the best of both worlds. There is a lot happening in this space, including:
- Hotwire
- React Server Components
- Marko partial hydration
- qwik aggressive lazy loading
- astro islands architecture
- …and SvelteKit, which Rich gives an impressive demo on.
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