Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

_posts/2019-07-23-browsers-are-pretty-good-at-loading-pages.md

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+---
+title: Browsers are pretty good at loading pages, it turns out
+layout: post
+categories:
+- blog
+tags:
+- html
+- javascript
+- web
+- www
+date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019
+---
+
+[Carter Sande](https://carter.sande.duodecima.technology/javascript-page-navigation/):
+
+> The <a> tag is one of the most important building blocks of the Internet. It
+> lets you create a hyperlink: a piece of text, usually colored blue, that you
+> can use to go to a new page. When you click on a hyperlink, your web browser
+> downloads the new page from the server and displays it on the screen. Most web
+> browsers also store the pages you previously visited so you can quickly go
+> back to them. The best part is, the <a> tag gives you all of that behavior for
+> free! Just tell the browser where you want to go, and it handles the rest.
+>
+> Lately, though, that hasn’t been enough for website developers. The new fad is
+> “client-side navigation”, where instead of relying on the browser to load new
+> pages for you, you write a bunch of JavaScript code to do it instead. It’s
+> actually really hard to get it right—loading the new page is simple enough,
+> but you also have to write code to display a loading bar, make the Back and
+> Forward buttons work, show an error page if the connection drops, and so on.
+
+So much this! The trend towards building a website/web app as a Javascript front
+end talking to an API makes web development more complicated than it needs to
+be. Many of these sites could (and should) be server rendered HTML.