| "Second, latency is a big thing in user experience. Go ahead, follow this author's advice, and do your JSON-to-HTML rendering on the client. See how it affects your latency. See how it affects your user experience. See how the latency affects your SEO standings. Try it out." I think this _is_ actually worth trying out (albeit as an experiment). If you can send JSON to the client (and have already cached the templates) rather than full rendered (uncacheable) HTML, you can (hopefully) reduce the amount of data that's being transmitted. This saves you in * latency - downloading a small JSON file will take less time than downloading a large HTML file (although with 4G and later high-bandwidth mobile data this becomes less relevant) - at what point does the additional download time offset the template-rendering CPU time? * CPU usage (and hence battery life) - if we assume HTTPS for the download, the TLS decryption isn't free - at what point does it use less CPU to render your JSON client-side than to download a big file? * radio usage (and hence battery life) - downloading more content means your radio must be on for longer, which is likely to use more power - at what point does the additional radio usage offset the CPU usage? In each case, I don't know where the balance lies, but I don't think it's clear cut that server-side HTML rendering is always a better thing on mobile devices. Having said that, I definitely agree with you on the battery life for general computation point - I'm not going to be bitcoin-mining on my cellphone! ;) |