Whatever I click on AirBnB, I get a white screen, then some placeholders, then the placeholders one after the other get replaced by the actual content.

Whatever I click on Wikipedia - its just there instantly.

Remember when AJAX was supposed to make pages faster? LOL. Of course, back then we were just sending HTML to be injected, not JSON that has to be processed by 50+ Javascript functions before finally becoming HTML (or, some DOM entities, anyway).

And offers far less features. Attaching a file to an email takes ages without drag and drop, this alone is worth waiting few more milliseconds to most people (Gmail loads in less than 2 seconds on my crappy hotel wifi)

Most of the time you read e-mails, not write them.

When you write e-mails, most of the time you don't need multiple attachments. The first attachment is reasonably fast to add.

It is possible to create a faster AirBnB by changing some of the underlying constrained imposed on the system (eg by accepting to serve cached, stale, listings; or by lowering the amount of telemetry) but apparently Airbnb management does not think the tradeoff is worth it.

Of course you are entitled to think that these decision from Airbnb are wrong and that they are hurting their sales. But you know the saying: « The least you know about a problem, the more convinced you are that you have the right answer »

AirBnB - client side spa.

the kind of page you like is the fancy html over wire kind

Both AirBnB and Reddit are incentived to collect a massive amount of data on their users and to maximize the experience in any way possible. They need the data to understand user behavior and feed it back into the recommendation algorithms. For both hospitality and social media, users look for images/video content since it is much more powerful than text for most people. All of their competitors have equally bad performance for similar reasons, so they don't lose a competitive edge.

Hacker news specifically goes for a retro look with an interface that has not changed significantly in decades. Wikipedia simply doesn't have the money or engineering capacity to support a more robust platform like airbnb or reddit.

For instance, on GCP, I:

  0. Open 2 tabs for a 2 google cloud instance
  1. For each tab, I click on the action I want. E.g Logs, deployment, and networking. 
  2. Then, for each tab again, I click on the nested action I want
  3. Repeat step 2

It does not happen on all sites, and I know GCP is a very complex site, but it happens often enough that it has become a habbit to me.

I love sites like Wikipedia or HN where everything is snappy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

[0] https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view

[1] https://hotwired.dev/

[2] https://laravel-livewire.com/

[3] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...

Look at how HN handles it when you upvote/unvote a comment.

Look at how old.reddit.com handles it when you click "load more comments" in a long thread.

How?

You can see votes appear on your network tab under the image tab instead of Fetch/XHR, even though their response return type is text/html -- interesting little hack, although I'm not quite sure why it's done this way instead of fetching since it already requires JS.

Like you said, AJAX isnt limited to XML, and is really just referring to any use of XMLHttpRequest to hotload data whether its XML, JSON etc.

I wasnt asking what ajax was. I was asking if it falls into the definition of "fancy."

I think my parent proved the opposite point they meant to. old reddit and hn and wp ARE the fancy html over wire sites, and airbnb and reddit are NOT the fancy over wire sites.

(Although modern sites that try to sweep latency under the rug by immediately updating the state on the client side and later reverting the change when the server responds are perhaps more annoying.)

That's thanks to a fantastic browser feature that was introduced a few years ago that hardly anyone knows about: Paint Holding - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/paint-holding/

"... where the browser waits briefly before starting to paint, especially if the page is fast enough. This ensures that the page renders as a whole delivering a truly instant experience."

This is why you don't see flashes of a blank white page while a new page is loading on most sites these days.

What is/was painful was, as an example, the first versions of ASP .Net Web Forms, where every client action was a full server round-trip... Server-rendered Blazor over the wire (not local or in-office server) is roughly as painful by today's standards.

I do think that it's a mix... start with basic html and enhance, or start with a component toolkit with client rendering, and inject server donut or other pre-rendering. With Cloudflare and Deno, I think the latter definitely has some traction.

This would definitely be a bad user experience.

But it doesn't mean refreshes are bad, just that the architect of that application hasn't factored them into the user experience appropriately, or they've made their interface unnecessarily complex.

All modern browsers have enough tools baked in that we can work around this without reinventing the execution and rendering pipeline (e.g. localStorage).

What's funny is that the old Reddit makes use of dynamic loading of content here and there the right way. The "load more comments" of the old Reddit is nice and fast. While the "continue this thread" of the new Reddit is annoying and slow.

Comparing Reddit and Wikipedia is like comparing a motorcycle to a bicycle. They are different, with specific strengths and weaknesses. Both design/engineering paradigms have a place, imo.

Old Reddit still works fine, and I’d argue better than new front end heavy Reddit. You are right it may be for the benefit developers, but Reddit isn’t complicated enough that a heavy front end provides much benefit to the users.

By young people, probably. Me and my friends that I know still use it prefer old.

As mentioned everywhere around this thread, the way to do server side rendered apps has also evolved. Hotwire, htmx, Unpoly, Livewire, etc, etc, etc.

https://grugnotes.com

I can load 3 years of notes on a single page 100kb.

I spend a lot of time in trains, hotels and airports, and I carry a 2017 12" MacBook. It strongly influences how I build websites. It's infuriating to wait for pure content to load because it's tied to a bunch of crap that isn't what you want to read.

In that context, developer docs are often the best kind of websites.