I've worked on projects where that was the expectation; I've set that expectation for projects.
The reasoning has both been concrete/practical and philosophical (but still practical):
* Mobile processing time is still costly in terms of battery life and performance. And the number of http calls (and their latency) also makes a difference in performance; SPAs tend to have smaller requests but larger numbers of them and it seems to me that's actually the opposite profile of what 3/4G cellular networks are good at. (And while this is all less true on the desktop I'm starting to find it annoying that we're nevertheless finding ways to make things choppy and slow on 2 GHz machines with operations not more complex than scrolling).
* This is more vague, but I find there's a discipline imposed in starting the conception of the app in terms of plain HTML/HTTP that seems to keep things better organized, while projects that start with a focus on a rich/heavy UI devolve into overspecific yet mixed concerns more quickly. This doesn't work for everything, since some apps just aren't about resources and media types. But honestly, your app probably is. :)
* Being able to debug/autotest with something like curl is pretty nice.
The reasoning has both been concrete/practical and philosophical (but still practical):
* Mobile processing time is still costly in terms of battery life and performance. And the number of http calls (and their latency) also makes a difference in performance; SPAs tend to have smaller requests but larger numbers of them and it seems to me that's actually the opposite profile of what 3/4G cellular networks are good at. (And while this is all less true on the desktop I'm starting to find it annoying that we're nevertheless finding ways to make things choppy and slow on 2 GHz machines with operations not more complex than scrolling).
* This is more vague, but I find there's a discipline imposed in starting the conception of the app in terms of plain HTML/HTTP that seems to keep things better organized, while projects that start with a focus on a rich/heavy UI devolve into overspecific yet mixed concerns more quickly. This doesn't work for everything, since some apps just aren't about resources and media types. But honestly, your app probably is. :)
* Being able to debug/autotest with something like curl is pretty nice.