Re:You probably don't need a single-page app
by Const-me on Sunday February 17, 2019 @07:25PM
(#19187803)
SPAs are especially bad on mobile.
When browser receives HTML, either complete pages or updated fragments of them, it only needs to parse HTML, style/layout, and render. These steps are relatively fast, especially rendering (usually GPU does that).
When browser received JSON or XML instead, it needs to do all that as well (parsing is slightly simpler), but also it needs to make visual elements out of the data. Takes a lot of processing and therefore electricity: JavaScript is not particularly fast, the code size is often not insignificant i.e. takes time to download and parse the code, and the runtime is essentially single threaded (for any given page).
When browser receives HTML, either complete pages or updated fragments of them, it only needs to parse HTML, style/layout, and render. These steps are relatively fast, especially rendering (usually GPU does that).
When browser received JSON or XML instead, it needs to do all that as well (parsing is slightly simpler), but also it needs to make visual elements out of the data. Takes a lot of processing and therefore electricity: JavaScript is not particularly fast, the code size is often not insignificant i.e. takes time to download and parse the code, and the runtime is essentially single threaded (for any given page).