Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

Re:Browsers are pretty good at loading pages by JulianMorrison on Sunday July 21, 2019 @04:28PM (#20493463)

The idea exists but it's clearly not true, except perhaps in specific, niche uses like re-rendering a continuously refreshed graph. Even for your image gallery, it makes for confusion. Back button does what? Shift-refresh does what? Just let the browser do what it does. If you want the images to render fast, use HTML 2.

Writing a web app with server side pages forces you to think about where the state lives. This is a beneficial discipline.

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Re:Browsers are pretty good at loading pages by trop on Sunday July 21, 2019 @05:05PM (#20493661)

Google Maps would be the classic example of client-side refresh working so well that it's now the universal choice. At the time, it was a revelation, as the Mapquest-ish predecessors (if I recall) required a click and server-side refresh to scroll or zoom the map.

Of course the revelation here was that <a> tags weren't what we needed to move a map, but rather a click-and-drag plus scroll-wheel behavior to explore a huge image at various levels of detail. If the server-side page-by-page navigation paradigm is a lousy fit for information delivered over the internet, then it may make sense to re-invent the page load.

To use the language of a sibling comment, this brought things to a much more app-ish behavior. And eventually Internet maps have become, especially on mobile devices, an app. Hence the need to break server-side navigation may have foreshadowed the need to break out of the browser.

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Re:Browsers are pretty good at loading pages by JulianMorrison on Sunday July 21, 2019 @05:34PM (#20493811)

I think this can be generalized as: if you need to break out of "click and wait a moment and see a changed screen" paradigm, for something like a continuously scrolling map or a smoothly flowing server load graph, then you can make good use of client-side loading.

If you are just trying to re-create it, don't.

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Re:Browsers are pretty good at loading pages by OkGoDoIt on Sunday July 21, 2019 @06:37PM (#20494107)

Exactly. But why a blog platform or news site or other content-focused website would feel the need to do that is beyond me. Not everything on the internet needs to be an app.

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Re:Browsers are pretty good at loading pages by kowdermeister on Sunday July 21, 2019 @04:50PM (#20493573)

The back button would do the same as it would do after you click a [next image] link :)

Not sure about your point, the history API improves UX if you do it right:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API

It does everything as hand written, pure HTML page would, just do it faster.

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