Yeah, sorry, but I just don't agree with the spirit of the comment, and I think it's thinking like this which leads programmers to over-engineer web applications, which usually harms user experience and wastes company money.
Absolutist statements like "no, you should not do a full form post just to toggle a checkbox" are just silly. There is no minimum bound beneath which a standard web browser form submission doesn't make sense, and writing extra JavaScript code to not only manage an asynchronous network request but also handle subsequent behaviours for success, failure, timeout, etc., is additional complexity which incurs additional cost and a greater potential for system failure.
Sometimes these implementation details and associated costs are necessary, but in most cases they aren't, and it's not an ideal perspective economically to default to the more expensive and complex implementation, especially for dubious benefit.
Ok. I don't see it that way. Most SPAs on the internet should never have been SPAs and it's usually poor judgement which leads a project in that direction. That poor judgement includes things like the characterisation of full page reloads as overly cumbersome and asynchronous requests as being lightweight. It also includes the expensive decision to try to reimplement the native browser behaviour that you get for free, as the commenter alluded to by suggesting asynchronous requests can be programmed to show a custom UI for error messages and use custom behaviour for retries of failed requests.
I believe I have indeed taken the time to understand what people are saying in these comments specifically and on this topic more broadly. And I just don't agree with the opinions presented. I think they're silly, in the same way that microservices are almost always adopted for silly reasons. The popularity of either approach doesn't negate their silliness.
> Absolutist statements like "no, you should not do a full form post just to toggle a checkbox" are just silly
That is because you didn't read or accept the frame that I set initially. I was very clearly refering to web apps that are SPAs (not websites!). Within that context, that statement is less absolutist and still true in 95% of the cases.
