I like this familly of technologies. Having an SPA-type app that's mostly backend.

Recently i've redone my app website (https://alt-tab.app), and I implemented a minimal spa.js that has a similar approach. I find the end result blazing fast, simple to maintain / reason about, few moving pieces. I used Early Hints, compressed every single thing, inlined CSS, etc. I don't know how i could even make it faster.

I recommend this approach for websites that are not very complex. Of course if i made a browser-based music player with a super dynamic UI, that would have been a different story~

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giovannibonetti 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

For those of you a similar SPA-type app with more type safety – which is even more useful for writing code with AI – you may want to have a look at the Gleam language and the Lustre web framework [1]. It combines the best of Elixir and Elm. You can mix and match having more logic in the backend or the frontend, as Gleam compiles both to Erlang and to JS.

[1] https://lustre.hexdocs.pm/lustre/server_component.html

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Intermernet 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can't the website be literally static HTML for 99% of it? I don't really see any user defined input that would change the output.

It's really fast, and seems fine, but is it just static pages? If not, why not. That's the question most front end devs don't ask themselves enough.

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epolanski 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I don't really see any user defined input that would change the output.

I feel like the distinction between static websites and SPAs has been lost in the last decade, despite it being in the name _single page application_.

The point of SPAs is not "it's more interactive than a static website is", but "I don't need to fetch the new page and wait it to load as I navigate". You can have any custom behavior just by adding JavaScript. That's something we have from 30+ years.

"applications" don't interrupt the user as you navigate, and we tried to replicate that on the browser, by having history and render JavaScript controlled.

	▲	oliwarner 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> each navigation had to reload the whole page Saving the world, 50ms at a time. Honestly there are times when using the View Transition API makes sense, but the context here is a dinky brochure site. The weight of scripting does as much damage to first load as it saves on subsequent loads. Browsers are good enough at managing this stuff themselves.

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OhSoHumble 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh, the alt tab developer! I actually love your product.

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sebmellen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Very cool concept with AltTab. Have always been looking for something like it!