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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

Late loading artifacts is all the fault of JS, not server-side rendering. Not sure what you mean by "odd navigation."

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.

>Server-side rendering (which means painful page reloads) is user hostile on slow network connections.

So is downloading an entire app when you only want to read one page.

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 you mean universal application? That's how nuxt.js/next.js works

Yes I am aware of these technologies, and it's basically what I mean, in an abstract way

That is what we have today.

It is not nearly as polished and as widespread as it could be.

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.

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