A lot of apparent SPAs also offer a simple server side rendered version of the website for search engines and AI agents.

You can for example read medium articles just fine with w3m.

In my experience, missing out on SPAs is not a particularly extreme hardship.

There's a few weird ones. I worked with a company that has what in my mind should be a static website, but it's not. It's headless Wordpress, with a Next.js frontend. It's just an informational websites, like what they do, contact information, services offered and a "blog", which is just one or two article published per month. The bloody thing is a single page app, routing is done in Javascript, rendering is Javascript... I don't understand it at all. It's a type of page that needs no Javascript at all, and yet it's built entirely as a Javascript frontend.

> I don't understand it at all. It's a type of page that needs no Javascript at all, and yet it's built entirely as a Javascript frontend.

Likely the solution was driven by the developer, not the needs of the people wanting that information, or the needs of the business.

I would hazard a guess that the author of the site either only knew one way to make a site, or they wanted to learn how to make a site that way, possibly as a portfolio piece.

not sure about the size of this company but I have been involved in more than a few where tech used to build websites, regardless of what they are, is set in stone. “we use angular.” there are no discussions or anything. people are interchangeable and frequently move from project to project - no problem, angular everywhere :)

My guess is developers don't know how to write HTML any more, only JavaScript.

I mean, as long as you don’t mind not being able to access the vast majority of published content, news and social media, that is.

News? Tripe riddled with advertising and tracking. Social Media? Opium for the masses. "Content"? Increasingly consists of ChatGPT regurgitant.

I don't see any loss of value there.

Sure, but you’re disconnecting from the things that other people use, you’ll become a social outcast as a result. I’d that’s something you’re personally okay with that’s fine, but humans generally want to fit in and be part of a society of likeminded peers.

IME news sites are noscript compatible. The only exception is forbes. Oh and advertising doesn't work without scripts.

For me it's banks and maps.

telnet mapscii.me :)

Cool, but:

• No option for alternate character aspect ratios; what if your characters are square, like an 8×8 font?

• They are using a quite old database dump of OpenStreetMap.

• No option to jump directly to a coordinate and zoom level.

while I was joking, the code behind that can be run locally: https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii

... it supports pointing at any public or private vector tile server, and does support supplying a starting coordinate and zoom. There is even a bug report explaining how to hack it for different font aspect ratios.

https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii/issues/26

Realistically, it's not practical, but then, is a map? When I want to know where something is, the map lets you calculate "how far away is it and how do I get there? what's nearby?" at a glance, but you can query those things directly in OSM data (there's a cli for that too). For actual maps, I have several GPS devices and...a map. It folds up.

I think a lot can work this way. Something is intentionally webapps, like google, those won't work, yes.

There is a plan for using CEF engine for a specific tab or website. The user would be able to make the website work with a single click and it would remember it. You would still have the advantage of a lightweight browser just in a lesser degree.