> You can still cache the HTML.
But then any time you update any part of the app, the user has to re-download the whole thing. It is also a problem with many traditional frontend builds, but if you carefully split it into chunks, you can update parts of the app while most of it stays cached.
See e.g. Linear’s approach to vendor dependencies: https://performance.dev/how-is-linear-so-fast-a-technical-br...
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The strong point of single .html apps is, of course, that you can run them locally without setting up a web server or anything, and deploy anywhere you want by just uploading it. But it is a fairly niche thing IMO.
Looking again, figure it has to do all the math again with each pan/drag, so minor latency makes sense.
Going through your article on the topic [0], I think the only strong point that SFWAs have which SPAs don’t is: “you can download and run them completely offline”. This highlights the best use case for SFWAs – it is something that you might want to download and run offline. Hypervault [1] is a better example here, IMO.
SFWAs do have drawbacks, mainly the inability to cache things independently (it’s all-or-nothing), or to download things in parallel. So basically it boils down to two questions:
• Is my app something users would want to run offline?
• Will I update it frequently enough for the cache problem to matter?
And it’s up to you to find the balance here.
[0]: https://gods.art/articles/single_file_web_apps.html
[1]: https://gods.art/articles/single_file_web_apps.html#hypervau...
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Actually I’ve just thought of something.
If it still makes sense to distribute your app as an SFWA, but you have to use a bundler, you can have the best of both worlds by making two builds: one as an SFWA, and one as a “traditional”, chunked static SPA. It should be fairly easy (just make two different configs, building from the same source).
> can't reuse a stylesheet, script or image on a different page (each has to have their own copy)
Isn't the point of a single HTML file that you don't have different pages that would need to reuse those assets?
> can't cache commonly used files
You can still cache the HTML.
> can't make granular changes to specific parts of the code
Pretty sure text editors can edit text regardless of whether it's a single file or multiple files.
> can't set a proper content security policy
I'd have thought a single page HTML file could negate the need for a CSP since you no longer have any resources accessible via a URI that you need to limit access to.
> you wouldn't want a single (extremely ugly) HTML file
Ugliness a subjective.
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I think your first load point is the strongest one. But I'd also throw in "it's harder to develop a good single page HTML"
You could probably mitigate some of that difficulty by having a build script (like static site compilers) but then you have to ask yourself if you're introducing more complexity than you're attempting to solve.