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* [Model/View/Controller](@/essays/mvc.md)
* [Is Rendering JSON More Efficient Than Rendering HTML?](https://github.com/1cg/html-json-speed-comparison)
* [Is JSON Smaller Than HTML?](https://github.com/1cg/html-json-size-comparison)
+* [You Can't Build Interactive Web Apps Except as Single Page Applications... And Other Myths](@/essays/you-cant.md)
### Complexity Very Very Bad
* [The Grug Brained Developer](https://grugbrain.dev)
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++++
+title = "You Can't Build Interactive Web Apps Except as Single Page Applications... And Other Myths"
+date = 2024-09-20
+updated = 2024-09-20
+[taxonomies]
+author = ["Tony Alaribe"]
+tag = ["posts"]
++++
+
+
+
+### **An Ode to Browser Advancements.**
+
+I often encounter discussions on Reddit and YCombinator where newer developers seek tech stack advice. Inevitably,
+someone claims it's impossible to build a high-quality application without using a single-page application (SPA)
+framework like React or AngularJS. This strikes me as odd because, even before the SPA revolution, many popular
+multi-page web applications offered excellent user experiences.
+
+Two years ago, I set out to build an [observability platform](https://apitoolkit.io) and chose to experiment with a
+multi-page application (MPA) approach using HTMX. I wondered: Would a server-rendered MPA be inadequate for a data-heavy
+application, considering that most observability platforms are built on ReactJS?
+
+What I discovered is that you can create outstanding server-rendered applications if you pay attention to certain
+details.
+
+**Here are some common MPA myths and what I've learned about them.**
+
+## Myth 1: MPA Page Transitions are slow because JavaScript and CSS are downloaded on every page navigation
+
+The perception that MPA page transitions are slow is widespread—and not entirely unfounded—since this is the default
+behavior of browsers. However, browsers have made significant improvements over the past decade to mitigate this issue.
+
+To illustrate, in the video below, a full page reload with the cache disabled takes 2.90 seconds until the
+DOMContentLoaded event fires. I recorded this at a café with poor Wi-Fi, but let's use this as a reference point. Keep
+that number in mind.
+
+
+
+It is common to reduce load times in MPAs using libraries such as **PJAX, Turbolinks, and even HTMX Boost**. These
+libraries hijack the page reload using Javascript and swap out only the HTML body element between transitions. That way,
+most of the page's head section assets don't need to be reloaded or re-downloaded.
+
+But there’s a lesser known way of reducing how much assets are re-downloaded or evaluated during page transitions.
+
+
+
+### Client-side Caching via Service workers
+
+Frontend developers who have built Progressive Web Applications (PWA) with SPA frameworks might know about service
+workers.
+
+For those of us who are not frontend or PWA developers, service workers are a built-in feature of browsers. They let you
+write Javascript code that sits between your users and the network, intercepting requests and deciding how the browser
+handles them.
+
+
+
+
+
+Due to its association with the PWA trend, service workers are only ordinary among SPA developers, and developers need
+to realize that this technology can also be used for regular Multi-Page Applications.
+
+
+
+In the video demonstration, we enable a service worker to cache and refresh the current page. You'll notice that there's
+no flicker when clicking the link to reload the page, resulting in a smoother user experience.
+
+Moreover, instead of transmitting over 2 MB of static assets as before, the browser now only fetches 84 KB of HTML
+content—the actual page data. This optimization reduces the `DOMContentLoaded` event time from 2.9 seconds to under 500
+milliseconds. Impressively, this improvement is achieved **without** using HTMX Boost, PJAX, or Turbolinks.
+
+### How to Implement Service workers in Your Multi-Page Application
+
+You might be wondering how to replicate these performance gains in your own MPA. Here's a simple guide:
+
+1. **Create a `sw.js` File**: This is your service worker script that will manage caching and network requests.
+2. **List Files to Cache**: Within the service worker, specify all the assets (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images) that
+ should be cached.
+3. **Define Caching Strategies**: Indicate how each type of asset should be cached—for example, whether they should be
+ cached permanently or refreshed periodically.
+
+By implementing a service worker, you effectively tell the browser how to handle network requests and caching, leading
+to faster load times and a more seamless user experience.
+
+### Use Workbox to generate service workers
+
+While it's possible to write service workers by hand—and there are excellent resources
+like [this MDN article](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API/Using_Service_Workers) to
+help you—I prefer using Google's [Workbox](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/workbox) library to automate the process.
+
+### Steps to Use Workbox:
+
+1. **Install Workbox**: Install Workbox via npm or your preferred package manager:
+
+ ```bash
+ npm install workbox-cli --global
+ ```
+
+2. Generate a Workbox Configuration file: Run the following command to create a configuration file:
+
+ ```bash
+ workbox wizard
+ ```
+
+3. **Configure Asset Handling**: In the generated `workbox-config.js` file, define how different assets should be
+ cached. Use the `urlPattern` property—a regular expression—to match specific HTTP requests. For each matching
+ request, specify a caching strategy, such as `CacheFirst` or `NetworkFirst`.
+
+ 
+
+
+1. **Build the Service Worker**: Run the Workbox build command to generate the `sw.js` file based on your configuration:
+
+ ```bash
+ workbox generateSW workbox-config.js
+ ```
+
+2. **Register the Service Worker in Your Application**: Add the following script to your HTML pages to register the
+ service worker:
+
+ ```html
+
+ ```
+
+By following these steps, you instruct the browser to serve cached assets whenever possible, drastically reducing load
+times and improving the overall performance of your multi-page application.
+
+
+
+Image showing the registered service worker from the chrome browser console.
+
+### [`Speculation Rules API`](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Speculation_Rules_API): Prerender pages for instant page navigation.
+
+If you have used **htmx-preload** or **instantpage.js,** you're familiar with prerendering and the problem
+the [“Speculation Rules API”](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Speculation_Rules_API) aims to solve. The
+Speculation Rules API is designed to improve performance for future navigations. It has an expressive syntax for
+specifying which links should be prefetched or prerendered on the current page.
+
+
+
+Speculation rules configuration example
+
+The script above is an example of how speculation rules are configured. It is a Javascript object, and without going
+into detail, you can see that it uses keywords such as “where,” “and,” “not,” etc. to describe what elements should
+either be prefetched or prerendered.
+
+
+
+[Example impact of prerendering (Chrome Team)](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/prerender-pages)
+
+
+## Myth 2: MPAs can't operate offline and save updates to retry when there's network
+
+From the last sections, you know that service workers can cache everything and make our apps operate entirely offline.
+But what if we want to save offline POST requests and retry them when there is internet?
+
+
+
+The configuration javascript file above shows how to configure Workbox to support two common offline scenarios. Here,
+you see background Sync, where we ask the service worker to cache any failed requests due to the internet and retry it
+for up to 24 hours.
+
+Below, we define an offline catch Handler, triggered when a request is made offline. We can return a template partial
+with HTML or a JSON response or dynamically build a response based on the request input. The sky is the limit here.
+
+## Myth 3: MPAs always flash white during page Transitions
+
+In the service worker videos, we already saw that this will not happen if we configure caching and prerendering.
+However, this myth was not generally true until 2019. Since 2019, most browsers withhold painting the next screen until
+all the required assets for the next page are available or a timeout is reached, resulting in no flash of white while
+transitioning between both pages. This only works when navigating within the same origin/domain.
+
+
+
+[Paint holding documentation on chrome.com](https://developer.chrome.com/blog/paint-holding).
+
+
+
+## Myth 4: Fancy Cross-document page transitions are not possible with MPAs.
+
+The advent of single-page application frameworks made custom transitions between pages more popular. The allure of
+different navigation styles comes from completely taking control of page navigation from the browsers. In practice, such
+transitions have mostly been popular within the demos at web dev conference talks.
+
+
+
+
+[Cross Document Transitions documentation on chrome.com](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/view-transitions).
+
+This remains a common argument for single-page applications, especially on Reddit and Hacker News comment sections.
+However, browsers have been working towards solving this problem natively for the last couple of years. Chrome 126
+rolled out cross-document view transitions. This means we can build our MPAs to include those fancy animations and
+transitions between pages using CSS only or CSS and Javascript.
+
+My favorite bit is that we might be able to create lovely cross-document transitions with CSS only:
+
+
+
+You can quickly learn more on
+the [Google Chrome announcement page](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/view-transitions)
+
+This link hosts a [multi-page application demo](https://view-transitions.netlify.app/stack-navigator/mpa-prerender/),
+where you can play around with a rudimentary server-rendered application using the cross-document view transitions API
+to simulate a stack-based animation.
+
+## Myth 5: With htmx or MPAs, every user action must happen on the server.
+
+I've heard this a lot when HTMX is discussed. So, there might be some confusion caused by the HTMX positioning. But you
+don't have to do everything server-side. Many HTMX and regular MPA users continue to use Javascript, Alpine, or
+Hyperscript where appropriate.
+
+In situations where robust interactivity is helpful, you can lean into the component islands architecture using
+WebComponents or any javascript framework (react, angular, etc) of your choice. That way, instead of your entire
+application being an SPA, you can leverage those frameworks specifically for the bits of your application that need that
+interactivity.
+
+The example above shows a very interactive search component in the [APItoolkit](https://apitoolkit.io). It's a web
+component implemented with lit-element, a zero-compile-step library for writing web components. So, the entire web
+component event fits in a Javascript file.
+
+
+
+
+
+## Myth 6: Operating directly on the DOM is slow. Therefore, it would be best to use React/Virtual DOM.
+
+The speed of direct DOM operations was a major motivation for building ReactJS on and popularizing the virtual DOM
+technology. While virtual DOM operations can be faster than direct DOM operations, this is only true for applications
+that perform many complex operations and refresh in milliseconds, where that performance might be noticeable. But most
+of us are not building such software.
+
+The Svelte team wrote an excellent article
+titled [“Virtual DOM is pure Overhead.”](https://svelte.dev/blog/virtual-dom-is-pure-overhead) I recommend reading it,
+as it better explains why Virtual DOM doesn't matter for most applications.
+
+## Myth 7: You still need to write JavaScript for every minor interactivity.
+
+With the advancements in browser tech, you can avoid writing a lot of client-side Javascript in the first place. For
+example, a standard action on the web is to show and hide things based on a button click or toggle. These days, you can
+show and hide elements with only CSS and HTML, for example, by using an HTML input checkbox to track state. We can style
+an HTML label as a button and give it a `for="checkboxID`" attribute, so clicking the label toggles the checkbox.
+
+```jsx
+
+
+
+
+ Content to be toggled when label/btn is clicked
+
+```
+We can combine such a checkbox with HTMX intersect to fetch content from an endpoint when the button is clicked.
+
+```html
+
+
Shell/Loading text etc
+
+```
+
+All the classes above are vanilla [Tailwind CSS](https://tailwindcss.com/) classes, but you can also write the CSS by
+hand. Below is a video of that code being used to hide or reveal log items in the log explorer.
+
+
+
+## Final Myth: Without a *“Proper”* frontend framework, your Client-side Javascript will be
+[Spaghetti and Unmaintainable](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/bkk0gl/avoiding_the_vanillajs_spaghetticode/).
+
+This may or may not be true.
+
+### Who cares? I love Spaghetti.
+
+I like to argue that some of the most productive days of the web were the PHP and JQuery spaghetti days. A lot of
+software was built at that time, including many of the popular internet brands we know today. Most of them were built as
+so-called spaghetti codes, which helped them ship their products early and survive long enough to refactor and not be
+spaghetti.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+The entire point of this talk is to show you that a lot is possible with browsers in 2024. While we were not looking,
+browsers have closed the gap and borrowed the best ideas from the single-page application revolution. For example,
+WebComponents exist thanks to the lessons we learned from single-page applications.
+
+So now, we can build very interactive, even offline web applications using mostly browser tools—HTML, CSS, maybe some
+Javascript—and still not sacrifice much in terms of user experience.
+
+
The browser has come a long way. Give it a chance!
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