alt Hacker NewsI am so grateful to the author for writing this article. For years I've been fighting a series of small battles with my peers who seem hell-bent on "upgrading" our e-commerce websites by rewriting them in React or another modern framework.
I've held the line, firm in my belief that there is truly no compelling reason for a shopping website to be turned into an SPA.
It's been difficult at times. The hype of new and shiny tools is real. Like the article mentions, a lot of devs don't even know that there is another way to build things for the web. They don't understand that it's not normal to push megabytes of JavaScript to users' browsers, or that displaying some text on a page doesn't have to start with `<React><App/></React>`.
That's terrifying to me.
Articles like this give me hope that no, I'm not losing my mind. Once the current framework fads eventually die out - as they always do - the core web technologies will remain.
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Let them have React and SSR everything? Didn't the NYT do this?
I think shopping gets this in spades too because not all shopping sites are meant to be particularly sticky.
It's one thing to browse the catalog at my leisure on gigabit networking, a 5k display and 16 CPU cores. It's another thing when I'm standing in Macy's or Home Depot and they don't quite have the thing I thought they have and I'm on my phone trying to figure out if I can drive half a mile to your store and get it. If you want to poach that sale your site better be fast, rather than sticky.