3 ms·

> Unfortunately, full client-side apps (or "single page apps") suffer from slow startup time and lack of discoverability from search engines. This is simply no

by Touche 12y ago

> Unfortunately, full client-side apps (or "single page apps") suffer from slow startup time and lack of discoverability from search engines. This is simply not true. Google announced that they can crawl single page apps just fine nearly a year ago (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understan...) and although Bing hasn't announced anything they are likely working on the same thing if it's not already rolled out. Google does this already; it works. Rendering on the server has little actual value in 2015 but it some how became a critical feature all of the JS frameworks are fighting for without proper explanation of its benefit. EDIT: It's fine if you disagree and I don't even mind being downvoted, but please do explain.

peterhunt 12y ago
I don't think anyone's actually seen this in the wild yet? Also even with this enabled I think you'll still incur the ranking hit for startup perf.
- Touche 12y ago
  > I don't think anyone's actually seen this in the wild yet? I have. It's a simple thing to test as well.
romaniv 12y ago
Rendering on the server has little actual value in 2015 There is life outside of Google, you know. There are other search engines, other crawlers that are not search engines, other programs people use on your website that are neither browsers nor crawlers.
- Touche 12y ago
  Can you be more specific? If I'm going to spend a great deal of money on compute and tailor my library decisions based on this feature, I need to know that it is really important. Alluding that Yandex might not have this technology yet is not good enough for me.
  - mutagen 12y ago
    I use http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/ to read HN on mobile devices. A handful of sites every day aren't compatible with whatever technology they're using to scrape page content. If the comments don't indicate that the article is worth visiting or there aren't any comments yet I don't see the content. Now this is just one anecdote about one pair of eyeballs but I'm a old-school PC full browser using pair of eyeballs, I suspect more and more people and machines are consuming web content in new ways, including without a Javascript interpreter mediating the web experience for them.
  - simonw 12y ago
    There are thousands of pieces of software that hit a URL and attempt to do something useful with the contents. Just try linking to a page on your own site on Twitter and tail your logfiles to see all the interesting bots that show up. A couple of examples off the top of my head: If you link to a web page on Reddit, they run a simple crawler to try and extract an image they can use as a thumbnail representation: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/af09fa8dee69bef4f65a1662d9ad91c2329946e1/r2/r2/lib/media.py#L470-L523 https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/af09fa8dee69bef4f65a16... If you link to a URL in Slack, they do something similar: https://api.slack.com/docs/unfurling https://api.slack.com/docs/unfurling
simonw 12y ago
It's still true that SPAs suffer from slow startup time. Google may be able to index SPAs but they can't do it nearly as effectively as static HTML - which is why still recommend you use progressive enhancement rather than going JavaScript-only: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-...

by Touche 12y ago

peterhunt 12y ago

I don't think anyone's actually seen this in the wild yet? Also even with this enabled I think you'll still incur the ranking hit for startup perf.

Touche 12y ago
> I don't think anyone's actually seen this in the wild yet? I have. It's a simple thing to test as well.

romaniv 12y ago

Rendering on the server has little actual value in 2015 There is life outside of Google, you know. There are other search engines, other crawlers that are not search engines, other programs people use on your website that are neither browsers nor crawlers.

Touche 12y ago
Can you be more specific? If I'm going to spend a great deal of money on compute and tailor my library decisions based on this feature, I need to know that it is really important. Alluding that Yandex might not have this technology yet is not good enough for me.
- mutagen 12y ago
  I use http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/ to read HN on mobile devices. A handful of sites every day aren't compatible with whatever technology they're using to scrape page content. If the comments don't indicate that the article is worth visiting or there aren't any comments yet I don't see the content. Now this is just one anecdote about one pair of eyeballs but I'm a old-school PC full browser using pair of eyeballs, I suspect more and more people and machines are consuming web content in new ways, including without a Javascript interpreter mediating the web experience for them.
- simonw 12y ago
  There are thousands of pieces of software that hit a URL and attempt to do something useful with the contents. Just try linking to a page on your own site on Twitter and tail your logfiles to see all the interesting bots that show up. A couple of examples off the top of my head: If you link to a web page on Reddit, they run a simple crawler to try and extract an image they can use as a thumbnail representation: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/af09fa8dee69bef4f65a1662d9ad91c2329946e1/r2/r2/lib/media.py#L470-L523 https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/af09fa8dee69bef4f65a16... If you link to a URL in Slack, they do something similar: https://api.slack.com/docs/unfurling https://api.slack.com/docs/unfurling

simonw 12y ago

It's still true that SPAs suffer from slow startup time. Google may be able to index SPAs but they can't do it nearly as effectively as static HTML - which is why still recommend you use progressive enhancement rather than going JavaScript-only: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-...