That’s also because they were not called SPAs for the first 15 years of the web.
The very first technology for building “SPAs” was Java Applets. Corel released a web-based office suite already in 1997, and it was practically an applet for each app.
This was replaced by Flash because Macromedia did an incredible job of getting Flash Player preinstalled on every desktop computer. If you wanted to deliver a rich and seamless app-like web experience in 1999-2004, you used Flash. (It was mostly very primitive as a dev environment, but did a great job at vector motion graphics and video.)
The original progenitors of present-day SPAs are Microsoft Outlook for Web and Google Maps. Outlook invented the ubiquitous XmlHttpRequest object, and Google Maps became so popular that it coined “AJAX.”
Following these examples, people started building DOM-based JavaScript apps that loaded data asynchronously and built up views entirely in code. And that’s when they became modern SPAs.
(There was also Silverlight and some other technologies that vied for the rich web app crown, but JS/DOM carried the day especially when iPhone happened and wouldn’t support anything else.)
Appreciate the history lesson. And yes, I was there for all of that (though not engaged in Web-app development).
One of the first AJAX apps I recall was the original Gmail. That was a revolution in what the browser could do, followed fairly shortly by others (notably Google Earth which launched about the same time).
SPAs simply to deliver relatively static content however seem ... a poor fit. I'll note that HN itself is LLML.
Which leaves my original question: what specifically was the selling point of SPAs, or Flash, or early AJAX? Because despite having live through that the emergence was both sufficiently diverse (a number of different approaches) and gradual that I don't have a sharp recollection of what that was.
The very first technology for building “SPAs” was Java Applets. Corel released a web-based office suite already in 1997, and it was practically an applet for each app.
This was replaced by Flash because Macromedia did an incredible job of getting Flash Player preinstalled on every desktop computer. If you wanted to deliver a rich and seamless app-like web experience in 1999-2004, you used Flash. (It was mostly very primitive as a dev environment, but did a great job at vector motion graphics and video.)
The original progenitors of present-day SPAs are Microsoft Outlook for Web and Google Maps. Outlook invented the ubiquitous XmlHttpRequest object, and Google Maps became so popular that it coined “AJAX.”
Following these examples, people started building DOM-based JavaScript apps that loaded data asynchronously and built up views entirely in code. And that’s when they became modern SPAs.
(There was also Silverlight and some other technologies that vied for the rich web app crown, but JS/DOM carried the day especially when iPhone happened and wouldn’t support anything else.)