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by ssorallen 4406 days ago
> Single page apps are not a new concept, but up until now they were typically a bad solution for public websites that depend on hits from search engines

If your users (I'm talking humans, not bots) have to download a mountain of JavaScript and execute it before seeing any content, your site is slower than it could be for everyone. We should stop saying that "single page apps", i.e. sites rendered in JavaScript in a browser, are bad because they can't be scraped by a bot. They are bad for EVERYONE who wants to view the site because of the network and CPU time it takes to download the assets and render the site in the browser.
1 comments
scotth 4406 days ago
Doesn't it all depend on how long they spend on the site? If it's one page and bounce, sure, that's a terrible experience. More pages than that? Now we're starting to see savings.
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ssorallen 4405 days ago
If you serve a rendered page of HTML with CSS links, browsers can progressively render the page as it is downloaded. Users will notice that on the first page load, particularly on higher latency connections where round trips for resources like JavaScript files are expensive.
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scotth 4405 days ago
My point still stands. Time to load is only part of the equation.
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