From the whole blog post, the thing that caught my eye was the side remark regarding SPAs vs MPAs. It was one of those things that people don’t tend to think about it but once someone touches on the subject, the problem become obvious. It seems that modern javascript frameworks focus on SPAs and try to shoehorn the concept everywhere, even when it clearly does not fit. Things reached a point where rewriting browser history to get that SPA to look like a MPA is now a basic feature of multiple pages, and it rarely works well.
Perhaps it’s too extreme to claim that MPAs are the future, but indeed there are a ton of webapps that are SPAs piling on complexity just to masquerade as MPAs.
At one point a few years ago, a few of us in Mozilla’s Japan team decided to interview local Web developers in Tokyo to learn what developer tools they would benefit from.
The results were surprising.
Many didn’t know about new CSS features that had shipped 10 years ago. What’s more, even when we told them about them, they didn’t seem too excited. They were doing just fine with jQuery and WordPress, thank you.
That’s your problem right there.
Japanese internet design is not exactly on the cutting edge.