Yeah but all of this is a symptom of a broader problem rather than reasons why the history API is useful.
SPAs, for example, require so many hacks to work correctly that I often wonder to myself if they’re not really just a colossal mistake that the industry is too blinded to accept.
As a user, I really don't care about the supposed purity or correctness of a website's tech stack. When I click "back" I want to go back to what I think the previous page was.
As a user, I don’t really care about the building materials used in construction. But that doesn’t mean builders should cut corners.
A building collapse and a poorly built website UI are completely different in terms of actual risk.
A building collapsing isn’t the only way people are affected by choices in construction. But if you want to talk about worst case scenarios then I can pick out some examples in IT too:
We constantly see people’s PII leaked on the internet, accounts hacked and money stolen, due to piss poor safeguards in the industry. And that’s without touching on the intentional malpractice of user tracking.
And yes, this is a different issue, but it’s another symptom of the same problem. Tech businesses don’t give a shit, and developers make excuses about how it’s not life or death. Except our bad choices do still negatively affect people’s lives even if we try to convince ourselves it doesn’t.
Could you provide some examples of the hacks you're referring to?
State management, URL fragment management, reimplementing basic controls...
One that I hate the most is that they first reimplement tabular display with a soup of divs, then because this is slow as a dog, they implement virtualized display, which means they now need to reimplement scrolling, and because this obviously breaks CTRL+F, they end up piling endless hacks to fix that - assuming they bother at all.
The result is a page that struggles to display 100 rows of data. Contrast that with regular HTML, where you can shove 10 000 rows into a table, fully styled, without noticeable performance drop. A "classical" webpage can show couple megabytes worth of data and still be faster and more responsive than typical SPA.
Sounds like you're referring to some specific examples of poorly implemented apps rather than the concept of SPAs as a whole.
For your example, the point of that div soup is that enables behaviours like row/column drag&drop reordering, inline data editing, realtime data syncing and streaming updates, etc. - there is no way to implement that kind of user experience with just html tables.
There's also huge benefit to being able to depend on clientside state. Especially if you want your apps to scale while keeping infra costs minimal.
I get the frustrations you're talking about, but almost all of them are side effects of solutions to very real UX problems that couldn't be solved in any other way.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that people building SPAs when all they needed was a page showing 10,000 rows of static data isn't a problem. It's just a people problem, not an SPA problem.
> all of them are side effects of solutions to very real UX problems that couldn't be solved in any other way.
Except they had been solved in other ways and the problem was people insisted on using web technologies to emulate those other technologies even when web technologies didn’t support the same primitives. And they chose that path because it was cheaper than using the correct technologies from the outset. And thus a thousand hacks were invented because it’s cheaper than doing things properly.
Then along comes Electron, React Native and so on and so forth. And our hacks continue to proliferate, memory usage be damned.
> And they chose that path because it was cheaper than using the correct technologies from the outset
No, otherwise they would not need all those hacks. Web stack makes it cheap (fast and easy) to build an MVP, but since the very primitives required to fully implement requirements are not even there, they end up implementing tons of ugly hacks held by duck tape. All because they thought they could iterate fast and cheap.
It's the same story with teams picking any highly dynamic language for an MVP and then implementing half-baked typing on top of it when the project gets out of MVP stage. Otherwise the bug reproduction rate outpaces fixing rate.
Having done native and web frontends, they are different.
I prefer the capabilities of native frameworks but I prefer the web box model.
Sizing stuff is native frameworks is nice until it isn’t.
I’ve done both too. And I honestly don’t like the box model.
But I will admit I’ve focused more on desktop than mobile app development. And the thing about sizing stuff is it’s a much easier problem for desktop than mobile apps, which are full screen and you have a multitude of screen sizes and orientations.
>> I get the frustrations you're talking about, but almost all of them are side effects of solutions to very real UX problems that couldn't be solved in any other way.
Any other way? Just build a web app with emscripten. You can do anything.
For a while GTK had an HTML5 backend so you could build whole GUI apps for web, but I think it got dropped because nobody used it.
> rather than the concept of SPAs as a whole.
This is the whole concept of the SPA - make a page behave like multiple pages. The premise itself requires breaking absolutely everything assuming that content is static.
> There's also huge benefit to being able to depend on clientside state. Especially if you want your apps to scale while keeping infra costs minimal.
Um... I'm old enough to remember the initial release of node, where the value proposition was that since you cannot trust client data anyway and have to implement thorough checking both client and server side, why not implement that once.
> I get the frustrations you're talking about, but almost all of them are side effects of solutions to very real UX problems that couldn't be solved in any other way.
Let me introduce you to our lord and savior native app
If you don't manage the history properly in your SPA, pressing the back button could take the user out of the app entirely.
If you don't let web developers manage history/state like this, we'd be going back to the inefficient world of, "every forward/back movement loads a whole page." (With lots of unnecessary round trip messages between the client and server while the user waits for everything to load).
Basically, the ability to manage history is a user-centric feature. It makes the experience better for them.
> If you don't manage the history properly in your SPA, pressing the back button could take the user out of the app entirely.
Yes. And that should be the default behavior: browser buttons should take you through the browser's history. If you keep a in-app state and want the user to navigate through it, you should provide in-app buttons.
Nobody complains that the browser's close button quits the browser instead of the app it's showing, or that the computer's power button shuts down the whole OS and not only the program in the foreground.
Users must be educated. If they have learned that left means "back" and right means "forward", that a star (sometimes a heart) means "remember this for me", and that an underlined checkmark means "download", then understanding the concept of encapsulation shouldn't be too much for them.
> Yes. And that should be the default behavior: browser buttons should take you through the browser's history. If you keep a in-app state and want the user to navigate through it, you should provide in-app buttons.
The Back and Forward buttons on a web browser is the navigation for the web. If you click a link on a static html page it will create a new entry. If you click back, it'll take you back. If you press forward, You will navigate forward.
We should not be creating a secondary set of controls that does the same thing. This is bad UX, bad design, and bad for an accessible web.
> Nobody complains that the browser's close button quits the browser instead of the app it's showing, or that the computer's power button shuts down the whole OS and not only the program in the foreground.
It does close the app it's showing because we have tabs. If you close a tab, it'll close the app that it's showing. If you close the browser, which is made up of many tabs, it closes all of the tabs. Before tabs, if you closed a window, the web page you were on would close as well. It does what is reasonably expected.
If on your web application you have a 'link' to another 'page' where it shows a change in the view, then you'd expect you would be able to press back to go back to what you were just looking at. SPAs that DON'T do that are the ones that are doing a disservice to the user and reasonable navigation expectations.
> Users must be educated. If they have learned that left means "back" and right means "forward", that a star (sometimes a heart) means "remember this for me", and that an underlined checkmark means "download", then understanding the concept of encapsulation shouldn't be too much for them.
They should not have to be 'educated' here. The mental model of using the back and forward buttons to navigate within a webpage is totally fine.