The rise of single-page applications (SPAs) and their impact on web development
The rise of single-page applications (SPAs) has had a significant impact on web development in recent years. SPAs are web applications that load a single HTML page and dynamically update the content as the user interacts with the page, rather than loading new pages from the server. This results in a more seamless and interactive user experience, similar to that of a native desktop or mobile app.
However, building SPAs presents some unique challenges for web developers. For example, SPAs can be less SEO-friendly since search engines typically index individual pages rather than a single page application. Additionally, server-side rendering and caching can be more complex since the server must render the initial HTML and CSS content for the entire app.
To overcome these challenges, developers have developed various techniques and tools, such as client-side routing and pre-rendering. Client-side routing allows the SPA to simulate navigation between pages while still being a single-page application, which can improve the user experience and help with SEO optimization. Pre-rendering, on the other hand, involves generating static HTML pages on the server-side for each route of the SPA, which can be served to search engines and improve the app's performance.
Overall, SPAs have revolutionized the way web applications are built and consumed, and developers must continue to adapt to this trend to build high-quality, performant, and accessible applications.
Of course if we now just look at twitter or Reddit it would seem that SPAs is so 2010, now that everyone wants to render at the edge, but I think that especially for small teams the complexity of building app that render at the edge and hydrate on the client creates a lot of complexity that doesn't make it worth it, for a sometimes negligible benefit in performance. In my opinion the biggest SPAs problem is serving open graph data for social media that differ based on the page, I don't think it's even possible if not by creating some kind of ad hoc server that renders the page based on the request, but this will hurt SEO since you're serving different data based on where the request is coming from...
Do you know a better solutions for this?