alt Hacker NewsSimple web pages can be made small with modern tooling, e.g. AstroJS.
The problem is that most web pages these days fundamentally are not simple.
Rather than trying to make web pages small, the real effort would be in designing web pages to be simple.
The large majority of software devs, PMs and the like don't really know how to do anything else than a Node + React webapp.
Replies
Snoozus • today at 10:35 AM
I agree, most websites allow complex flows. But I suspect, that most loads don't ever touch those. There is probably an automated way to deliver just a flat page, and maybe even allow for the top 5 interactions without loading all the frameworks and libraries.
I've come to the opinion that for the vast majority of apps I've built, it could all be built using HTML + CSS (all built server side). I can sprinkle in little bits of interactivity using something like HTMX. And I'll have a website that is very easy to optimise, has phenomenal backwards compatibility, and gets rid of a whole class of issues associated with SPAs.
I often regret in my career not pushing back more on "requirements" that ended up requiring a more complicated app, whereas the customer would have been happier with a simpler solution.