Post by @slightlyoff@toot.cafe

2025-11-29 04:27 UTC

@soviut @sil But it's those same flows where this technology tends to fail most spectacularly. Go trace your local food delivery system w/ WPT or a low-spec device. Here in the US, the UIs of Grubhub, Caviar, Opentable, and many others have been totally destroyed by this tech. I've been getting variations of "we need this to be built in a heavyweight JS framework because 'it's an app'" for years and years, and I'm not going to take the theory as valid when ~all of the practice cuts against it.

Replies (2)

@slightlyoff@toot.cafe 2025-11-29 04:30

@soviut @sil That said, I agree that when things come in under specific budgets, this can be a better way to build certain classes of UI. I'm using elk.zone to post this, and it's wonderful. The YT PWA is pretty great. But these are exceptions that prove the rule: the set of teams that can be trusted to do a good job with an SPA stack could deliver a great experience without it.

Open ##1564167
@soviut@hachyderm.io 2025-11-29 07:58

@slightlyoff @sil I don't think the "practice" cut against it. I think the only thing it cuts against is engineering philosophy and an academic mindset. I believe it's important to be measuring this stuff, but I also treat performance as a feature, and features get cut all the time. For example, the latest Pokemon games on Switch have terrible performance issues but it sold 5.8 million copies in its first week. The game was compelling enough that anyone who played it didn't care. The only ones loudly complaining were people who didn't really play them; the video game academics, so to speak. My point is that teams are optimizing for their users and sometimes that means performance takes a hit.

Open ##1564180