Thanks for the brilliant post!
Multiple page applications don't need React for the single page feeling either. If you just want to prevent reloading the same header, navigation etc. for each page change, that's what AJAX did in Web 2.0 and it still does. Take a small utility like pjax and you get the same page speed improvement while still providing accessible and SEO-friendly pages each of which remains a complete landing page out of the box.
Thank you Ingo, this answered my question of, can MPA's provide that SPA native app feeling w/ navigation? Would you say that utilities like pjax or what Ryan mentioned (HTML frames), do exactly that? Or is it more complicated, and there are pros/cons? Personally I think it would be cool if things migrated more back to SSR versus CSR due to performance issues, but IMO the 'native feeling' is quite important...
I find it hard to see the pro's of (over)using React (etc.) for everything that just used to work even 20 years ago. Make pages load quickly by optimizing both frontend and backend for page speed (use caching, reverse proxy etc. optimize database queries, avoid unnecessary requests). React's new server side rendering features add a lot of complexity for the sake of what? The pre-rendered pages have to be "hydrated" with the client-side JavaScript application anyway so we get a good time to first byte, but a very bad time to interactive score.
But to answer your actual question: there are (and have been) ways to achieve the native feeling with very few JavaScript. Basically you intercept full page / document requests and load partial content and update the DOM using JavaScript, which makes it easy to use CSS transitions, loading animations and the like.
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Thanks for the brilliant post!
Multiple page applications don't need React for the single page feeling either. If you just want to prevent reloading the same header, navigation etc. for each page change, that's what AJAX did in Web 2.0 and it still does. Take a small utility like pjax and you get the same page speed improvement while still providing accessible and SEO-friendly pages each of which remains a complete landing page out of the box.
Yes pjax seems to be an example of what I was calling HTML frame above. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you Ingo, this answered my question of, can MPA's provide that SPA native app feeling w/ navigation? Would you say that utilities like pjax or what Ryan mentioned (HTML frames), do exactly that? Or is it more complicated, and there are pros/cons? Personally I think it would be cool if things migrated more back to SSR versus CSR due to performance issues, but IMO the 'native feeling' is quite important...
I find it hard to see the pro's of (over)using React (etc.) for everything that just used to work even 20 years ago. Make pages load quickly by optimizing both frontend and backend for page speed (use caching, reverse proxy etc. optimize database queries, avoid unnecessary requests). React's new server side rendering features add a lot of complexity for the sake of what? The pre-rendered pages have to be "hydrated" with the client-side JavaScript application anyway so we get a good time to first byte, but a very bad time to interactive score.
But to answer your actual question: there are (and have been) ways to achieve the native feeling with very few JavaScript. Basically you intercept full page / document requests and load partial content and update the DOM using JavaScript, which makes it easy to use CSS transitions, loading animations and the like.