10 Years of Meteor
While I’ve always been bothered by the downsides of SPAs, I always thought the gap would be bridged sooner or later, and that performance concerns would eventually vanish thanks to things like code splitting, tree shaking, or SSR. But ten years later, many of these issues remain. Many SPA bundles are still bloated with too many dependencies, hydration is still slow, and content is still duplicated in memory on the client even if it already lives in the DOM.
Yet something might be changing: for whatever reason, it feels like people are finally starting to take note and ask why things have to be this way.
Interesting to see a decade-long perspective. I especially like how Sacha revisits and reasseses design principles from ten years ago:
- Data on the Wire. Don’t send HTML over the network. Send data and let the client decide how to render it.
Verdict: 👎
It’s since become apparent that you often do need to send HTML over the network, and things seem to be moving back towards handling as much as possible of your HTML compilation on the server, not on the client.
