story
Why is the standard approach still transactional?
The first is latency. When you scroll or click, you want the response to happen quickly. If you're streaming the response you have to wait for at least one round trip before anything happens.
Secondly is bandwidth. For all the snark about bloated images and JS libraries, the web is extremely bandwidth light. A 1080p video is less so.
Thirdly, it was tried before. Opera Mini used to render pages before sending them out. It sort of worked for low powered devices but had a lot of quirks which I think gave the idea a bad name.
Finally, it would be impossible to block ads on a streamed website. See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/the-future-of-the-web-is-vn...
The only potential drawback I see is whether or not search crawlers could index content that's introduced via JS after a page load.
Edit: It also appears to protect from scraping... so I suspect it would conflict with indexability. That's a pretty big downside if true.
Edit: It is almost AJAX. The more I think about it the more the boundaries get blurry. Essentially, it's AJAX that does not fetch or receive resources directly. It interacts with a buffer that holds JSON which describes the next batch of cards. The images are streamed via <img> tag, so the buffer is small relative to the media it represents.
[1] https://www.stallman.org/archives/2023-jul-oct.html#26_Septe...
[2] https://www.stallman.org/archives/2023-jul-oct.html#11_Septe...
That is to say: You would load your desired website (the standard way) and then experience a "refresh-less" session for the duration of your visit.
An average website is a couple megs (maybe?)
What advantage would "streaming" that have over just loading it?
How would you account for AJAXy sites/services?
