Part of it is technical. The most modern stack usually completely break deep linking:
- even the best spa out there often barely shim the normal browser behavior. Yesterday my back button broke once more, in 2021. Infinite scroll don't let you pinpoint your position. User don't expect being able to copy / paste a link to take them to the content anymore.
- the ecosystem of url handling is fractured. This month I worked on a Django + React app, and my clients asked that it should be able to handle being hosted behind an arbitrary URL prefix if provided in the conf. Here are the things I had to tweak:
* adding the prefix to the proxy pass apache conf (yes, they are still using it);
* adding the prefix the react router conf for which most tutorials were outdated;
* adding the prefix in the js bundler conf as the base, and for the dev proxy;
* adding the prefix in the <base> element in the main template;
* making all urls and ajax calls relative to the <base>;
* making all the react router Link and history.push _absolute_ (took me a while to figure this out);
* serving the index.html as a template file from django, not nginx, to inject all that stuff according to the env var.
* hacking the build script to replace static files URLS with template place holders because the js bundler didn't have a hook for that (thanks sed);
And that's on top of the regular work of making urls in SPA works, which implies sync your backend and frontend URLS for pages and API. Who is going to do all that works? In fact, how many devs have the knowledge to do that? Pre-SPA, there would have been well documented 2 steps to do the same thing. The junior in the team could figure it out.
- we had a ton of manure on top of our urls. AMP. Url shorteners. Tracking ID and redirections. Content wall. Captcha. Often several of them at the same time. If one of them break in the chain, goodbye URL.
- low code mean low skill devs, that never heard the mantra "cool url don't change". They don't even know they should care.
- some browsers just hide the URL. The users don't know what an url is anyway.
- apps don't care about deep linking. They could handle url fine, mind you. We have the tech for it. But it's not even on the radar of most devs. You don't address the content, you consume whatever pops up, so why bother ?
Plus, google is so good at finding the content you want out of the barely readable drunken mess of letters you feed it that most people don't type url anymore. People don't care about URL just like people don't care about bees dying, because it's too abstract to worry about.
- even the best spa out there often barely shim the normal browser behavior. Yesterday my back button broke once more, in 2021. Infinite scroll don't let you pinpoint your position. User don't expect being able to copy / paste a link to take them to the content anymore.
- the ecosystem of url handling is fractured. This month I worked on a Django + React app, and my clients asked that it should be able to handle being hosted behind an arbitrary URL prefix if provided in the conf. Here are the things I had to tweak:
And that's on top of the regular work of making urls in SPA works, which implies sync your backend and frontend URLS for pages and API. Who is going to do all that works? In fact, how many devs have the knowledge to do that? Pre-SPA, there would have been well documented 2 steps to do the same thing. The junior in the team could figure it out.- we had a ton of manure on top of our urls. AMP. Url shorteners. Tracking ID and redirections. Content wall. Captcha. Often several of them at the same time. If one of them break in the chain, goodbye URL.
- low code mean low skill devs, that never heard the mantra "cool url don't change". They don't even know they should care.
- some browsers just hide the URL. The users don't know what an url is anyway.
- apps don't care about deep linking. They could handle url fine, mind you. We have the tech for it. But it's not even on the radar of most devs. You don't address the content, you consume whatever pops up, so why bother ?
Plus, google is so good at finding the content you want out of the barely readable drunken mess of letters you feed it that most people don't type url anymore. People don't care about URL just like people don't care about bees dying, because it's too abstract to worry about.