• Rusty Shackleford
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    2 months ago

    Noob question: what is the SPA era of web design; when did it roughly start?

    • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      By SPA I mean “single page application” it’s currently the dominant approach and powered in a large part by technologies like react and node. I’m not certain when it started precisely… with technology it’s more a case of “rising to prominence” rather than “first happened” I think it probably really started going around 2014 with HTML5?

      SPAs are still pretty hot but they’ve waned in popularity due to overuse and general complexity. Essentially your website becomes a single page that just swaps out what’s shown to the user as they “navigate” between different parts of the site. When well done this can make a site incredibly responsive, but it’s often quite poorly done and responsiveness can end up blocked by server requests anyways.

      • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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        2 months ago

        Interestingly the pendulum is now swinging the other way. If you look at next.js for example, server generated multi page applications are back on the menu!

        • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          Yea, I don’t want to totally shit on SPAs but server-side rendering has a lot of advantages and is so much fucking simpler.

          I’m a PHP dev and DB specialist in my day job - there are a lot of good server-side tech options.

    • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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      2 months ago

      I’d place it right around when angular started gaining traction. That’s when it became common to serve just one page and have all the navigation happen in JavaScript.