As an accessibility and efficiency consultant, the vast majority of“SPA” I’ve dealt with falls into one of three categories:
- Stuff that would be faster, simpler, and easier to maintain as a normal everyday website.
- Stuff that flips the bird at users with accessibility needs and/or those who actively block — or work for companies that actively block — client-side scripting.
- Stuff that would be a fraction the code if the developers knew the first blasted thing about HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, and would back the **** away from the moronic half-tweet nose-breathing framework garbage, and stopped diving for NPM for code that barely qualifies as one-liners but even that’s too complex to “do yourself” for copypasta developers.
It is thus that most of my work involves ripping out SPA, or refactoring “large enterprise” crapplets into lean, mean, 1/10th the code that is goal oriented instead of “what can I blindly copy or load with NPM to shit code I don’t even understand all over the place”, and educating client’s staff on where they went wrong and why. Whether they want to hear it or accept it as fact or not. And if they don’t, well… I tell their boss to start handing out pink slips.
And it’s sad how most of the tools lying to their bosses about their knowledge and competence I have to get fired to fix client’s problems!
Now, I’m NOT saying there aren’t legitimate use cases for SPA, but far too often these days I’m seeing people throwing it at everything like the proverbial carpenter trying to drive screws with a hammer. Leading to so-called “Large scale Enterprise Apps” being ignorant incompetent disasters that create nothing but technical debt.
Thus why when people say “enterprise” I kind of scoff expecting that I’ll be dealing with suck-ups, sycophants, and yes-men incapable of writing a single line of code beyond “Hello World”… well, than and during the Microcomputer vs. Big Iron wars I was on the Micro side of the divide. Thus “enterprise” is more of a warning sign of developer incompetence — a glittering generality — than it is a mark of quality.
Just like all the other propaganda based gibberish people swallow like Jeebus just blessed the water.
Bottom line? Most “Large Scale Enterprise SPA” are monuments to ignorance, incompetence, and ineptitude, bending the owners over the table and blowing smoke up everyone’s backside. They are two to ten times the code needed, usually five times as complex, and inherently tell large swaths of potential users “we don’t care about you!”
Which is likely why all these bloated garbage frameworks are so hot and trendy with the know-nothing fools and tools slopping this trash together!