I think what outline does would be much harder to implement without JS. As it stands, it seems to take parse the URL, fetch the page with a specific UA / some other magic, then automatically format it, without having to store anything on disk and without having to generate static html. Wouldn't this be much, much harder without using JS?
> without having to store anything on disk and without having to generate static html. Wouldn't this be much, much harder without using JS?
While it's possible to do without storing anything on disk (strange requirement imo - but you can keep it in memory on the server if you really want), it's a lot more practical to do this work in the backend. And that's also what outline is doing:
outline's frontend will do an AJAX request to outline's servers to actually fetch the article from a blog and serve that back[1]. So they could do this easily without frontend javascript. But I think the UX would suffer on many levels. Having a frontend in javascript allows outline to do better caching, better user experience, etc. The only downside to using JS is that it doesn't work for people still in 1995 and for people who disable their javascript.