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Comment by ttty | Hacker News Reader

Normally you'll always need to add something interactive, therefore js. To do that with server side rendering you'll couple the client side to the server side.

For example the server has to send a tag with a class name that the client also is aware of that.

Therefore you have 1 component, where half is on server side and half of on client side, which in my opinion is not maintainable.

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> Normally you'll always need to add something interactive

Especially in news, articles, longreads, right? /s

Most of the internet content would be perfectly fine without interaction, or with ordinary, oldschool POST forms

...? "Most of the world is fine with whale oil lamps, who needs electricity"

Try a really good interactive article from the New York Times. You'll have a much more impactful experience than if you read a blurb about the same thing on your RSS reader.

That's why I think these conversations are so meaningless. My job would be a nightmare if I didn't use SPAs. It's all about the right tool for the job.

News web site can return part of the page (e.g. news article) to decrease TTFB, and then load less important content (e.g. news recommendation) after.

As author said, it is tradeoff.

... or inline all in one html on server side and send it down at once?

You can get surprisingly far without Javascript, imo. Interactivity means a lot of different things, do you won't always need to have coordinating front and back ends

This is unrelated to the article. Many webpages, like HN, use JS but are not SPAs.

I think old.reddit.com's interface is more user-friendly than HN's. Why should I leave the page to write a comment? Avoiding JS just for the sake of avoiding is just blind fanaticism under the pretense of being faster and more lightweight.

(The new reddit redesign is a resource hogging abomination riddled with needless SPA bullshit, but the old reddit design was pretty clean and minimal and yet an SPA.)

The old Reddit design isn't really an SPA. It's just server rendered with a bit of Ajax for interactivity

I think the definition is a bit murky there. I can do a _lot_ of things on a Reddit page without a refresh: add comments, delete comments, edit, sticky, report as spam, save, hide the post, view the contents of the post (if it's an image), crosspost to other subs, etc. I understand that a true SPA would never require a refresh for anything, but this comes pretty close.

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