Isomorphic. Thank you, I was searching my brain for that word for like half an hour. :-) > Why should your code care if it is running on my computer or yours?

Isomorphic. Thank you, I was searching my brain for that word for like half an hour. :-) > Why should your code care if it is running on my computer or yours? It shouldn't. But my users already care about perceived latency, and that is directly limited by the speed of light. My users want feedback as quickly as possible that their input has been received, and that something is happening in response. Thanks to the speed of light, this would ideally take place instantly right in front of their eyeballs. That can't happen yet, so as much as can realistically happen on my user's CPU, memory, and storage is the next best thing. > They do crawl REST APIs. Specifically, ones using Hypertext Markup Language. What I meant to say was JSON, so I'm contributing to my own pet peeve of saying "REST" and meaning "JSON." :-p HTML is awesome and does a wonderful job of letting me mark content in a way that it can be efficiently rendered, semantically, and be both human-readable and marginally machine readable. There are two problems, though. The first is that full documents (since the article points out AJAX is not performed by Google) are incredibly repetitive and wasteful, especially when retrieving the same content fragments multiple times. The second is that it is strongly coupling content and presentation, two orthogonal concepts, much earlier than is optimal. Sure, you can cache full documents and display them when requested again, but the more common case is that a large subset of what I just displayed to my user will be displayed again, with one new item, but has still invalidated my cache because the granularity is at the full-page presentation level, and not the business domain object level. If, instead, I cache and render business objects on the client side, I can be more intelligent and granular with my caching strategy, react much more quickly to my users' feedback, and have a much smaller impact on their constrained devices. Not only that, but transmitting structured business objects instead of presentation-structured content lets me more efficiently reuse that data across devices for which HTML may not be the most effective way to present the data to them. My personal architectural bents aside, the truth remains that content discovery agents (e.g. indexers) should not be treated as content delivery agents with such a huge influence on content format. This ends up creating (IMO) too much influence over external engineering decisions, rather than allowing engineers to think critically about the right architecture that gives users the best possible experience. Most importantly, I'm not saying that all the engineering effort should be placed upon the discovery agents. Of course there are limits on how much they can discover on their own, and (as always in matters involving many parties) there need to be good conversations about the state of things, and what we think is the right direction to go to support each other and our users. It's just been my opinion lately that this is not so much a conversation anymore as a unidirectional stream of "best practices" coming from a single group.