Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

I do try to have something of a theme about each week’s collection of links, though sometimes (like this week) the theme can be a bit tenuous.

SPAs were a mistake

Chris Ferdinandi writes

For years, a trend in our industry has been to build single-page apps, or SPAs.

With an SPA, the entire site or app lives in a single HTML file. After the initial load, everything about the app is handled with JavaScript. This is, in theory, supposed to result in web apps that feel as fast and snappy as native apps.

Today, I want to explore why that’s nonsense. Let’s dig in!

SPAs were a mistake

I found this piece via Simon Willison, and it prompted something of a discussion on the bad website hackernews and Twitter. Why I think articles like this are worth reading is not so much whether I agree with them (in this case I do feel SPAs were a sort of local maximum developed at a time when native iOS and Android (but mostly iOS) apps were considered the pinnacle of desired user experience). Rather it’s to question what we are doing reflexively, unthinkingly, just because it’s how we do things.

Over time the SPA pattern got baked into our technologies (Simon and others in particular call out React in this), and became what I call a ritual (after this chapter from the Tao Te Ching)

Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted;
Closely held beliefs are not easily released;
So ritual enthralls generation after generation. 

Tao Te Ching Chapter 38

Which turns out to be related to another piece I came across this week, from Dimitri Glazkov, The cost of opinion. Glazkov is talking about the opinions embedded in our abstractions, in particular technological abstractions, such as frameworks

Frameworks and libraries are like layers, and these layers accrete.

Every layer has a vector of intention, pointing toward some idealized value to users, determined by the author of the layer.

Opinion, 
or the difference
between the vectors of intention of two adjacent layers,
always comes at a cost. 

Opinion costs compound
and are, directly or indirectly, 
shouldered by users.

Dimitri Glazkov, The cost of opinion

It’s a very thoughtful and thought provoking piece.

Interview with a Senior JS Developer in 2022.

I’ll round out with this rather droll video, from Programmers are also human, Interview with a Senior JS Developer in 2022. If you’re a JavaScript developer you’ll find it amusing. And exasperating. As Homer said, “it’s funny because it’s true” (Homer Simpson, not the Greek guy).

In 2022 we have a whole series of events for Front End Developers

Across 2022 Web Directions is presenting our series of online conferences for front end designers and developers. Focussed deep dives, they go far beyond what you might expect from conference programs.

Learn more and register now

Priced individually from $195, or attend all 6, plus get access to our conference presentation platform Conffab for just $595, or $59 a month.