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It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA


Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing. Yet people keep building terrible apps instead of performant websites.

A page transition that looks smooth, until you realise it’s just fading between two loading states Broken scroll restoration Inconsistent focus behaviour Delayed navigation while scripts rehydrate components Layout shift, content popping, or full-page skeletons A performance hit that’s entirely disproportionate to the effect What we’re calling “modern CSS” here is shorthand for View Transitions, Speculation Rules, and a return to native browser features that were always designed to handle navigation, interaction, and layout. And that structural clarity reinforces everything I argued in Why semantic HTML still matters – that clean, meaningful markup is the bedrock of performance, maintainability, and machine readability.

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