this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Programming
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TL:DW Magic
Nah, a lot of old tech. I used to work on shit like this... loading all your images (including the fucking rounded corners for IE) into a sprite... setting up caching, using prefetching and inlined CSS/JS for critical path stuff.
There was a whole industry around web performance in the days that a customer might be trying to download your site over their 256 kbps connection.
It's neat tech and I miss fiddling with it. I honestly found it a lot more fulfilling than the SPA era of web design.
Noob question: what is the SPA era of web design; when did it roughly start?
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.
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.
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!
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.