I wrote most of this post sometime in 2022 but I think it holds up alright in 2024 so I decided to publish it for posterity. I don’t really like doing posts like this—I’d much rather share some innocuous learnings or tips but it turns out I have opinions too 😓 Sorry! Since I quit Mozilla and went back to full-time Web development, I’ve discovered a few surprises. It turns out Web development is actually pretty hard, Web developers are actually very smart, and some of these frameworks and techniques we mocked as browser engineers aren’t so bad. Oops. At the same time, it turns out some Web developers have ideas about browsers and the Web that, as a former browser engineer and standards editor, I’m a bit dubious of. Here are a few of the things that surprised me.
  • lysdexic@programming.dev
    ·
    10 months ago

    From the whole blog post, the thing that caught my eye was the side remark regarding SPAs vs MPAs. It was one of those things that people don't tend to think about it but once someone touches on the subject, the problem become obvious. It seems that modern javascript frameworks focus on SPAs and try to shoehorn the concept everywhere, even when it clearly does not fit. Things reached a point where rewriting browser history to get that SPA to look like a MPA is now a basic feature of multiple pages, and it rarely works well.

    Perhaps it's too extreme to claim that MPAs are the future, but indeed there are a ton of webapps that are SPAs piling on complexity just to masquerade as MPAs.