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> it would be interesting to learn what lead to over 400,000 lines of CSS in over 2000 files for an actually not that complex site in the first place This is s

> it would be interesting to learn what lead to over 400,000 lines of CSS in over 2000 files for an actually not that complex site in the first place This is so common. Lot of time, they use CSS to change the design of the module, which is how it should be. But when they revert the look of the module, instead of deleting CSS, they add new rules to overwrite existing CSS. Which leads to specificity fight and !important. At my previous job, site was rendering on server. It was old, and we wanted to redesign it. I wanted to keep rendering on the server. CTO and VP wanted to build Angular site because everyone is moving to Angular and its easy to find Angular developers. Company's 30+% of new visitors comes through SEO.

ianlevesque 12y ago
And what's even better is that Angular is throwing everything out an starting over with 2.0.
- thekingshorses 12y ago
  Well, they don't know that! All our servers (API/DB) are slow, and they think that Angular will free up resource (Because not rendering on servers), and using "free" client resource to render, it will be fast.
IkmoIkmo 12y ago
> At my previous job, site was rendering on server. It was old, and we wanted to redesign it. I wanted to keep rendering on the server. CTO and VP wanted to build Angular site because everyone is moving to Angular and its easy to find Angular developers. Company's 30+% of new visitors comes through SEO. I think I missed the point of your second paragraph, I'd be interested to know what you meant to say. (currently working with Angular on a small hybrid app and thought about experimenting with it on the web but SEO concerns were the first thing that came to mind, so it feels like a relevant piece to me!)
- lstamour 12y ago
  The implication is that without server-side rendering, SEO would drop. This isn't actually true for Google (edit: sometimes!), since it executes JavaScript, in part to prevent SEO gaming of its platform. But it would likely harm other web crawlers unless care was taken to incrementally add Angular to the existing HTML pre-rendered, or to execute the Angular.js server-side for bots and a nice page load speedup.
  - mikermcneil 12y ago
    @lstamour Careful! We tested this theory last Fall with sailsjs.org and it turned out to be patently false-- we went from the second result when you google "Node.js framework" to not even being present. When I turned our headless browser snapshot stuff on again about a month later (we use brombone), it worked itself out. Needless to say, sucks :/ But everyone should be aware of the reality.
    - lstamour 12y ago
      Sorry, that's true. I should have been a bit less forceful on that one. I know personally that there's a lot which goes into Google's rankings -- for instance: mobile optimization, SSL, and (where JS can slow things down the most) page speed. Google wants the web to be fast, and if two websites have identical rankings, it will rank the faster one higher. Waiting on JavaScript delays the "time to visible content" by a significant amount.
  - danneu 12y ago
    From my experience, the state of javascript for what's ostensibly the best web crawler in the world is still "it might work".
  - thekingshorses 12y ago
    I know google is experimenting but I have never seen any JS rendered page in the google search result. My mobile hacker news client http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/ ranks top on Google but not because of the content. Content is not indexed by Google.
youngtaff 12y ago
>At my previous job, site was rendering on server. It was old, >and we wanted to redesign it. I wanted to keep rendering on >the server. CTO and VP wanted to build Angular site because >everyone is moving to Angular and its easy to find Angular >developers. Company's 30+% of new visitors comes through SEO. IMV most people don't understand the tradeoff's they're making when they adopt Angular - I'm seeing plenty of sites that have huge start up times due to them using Angular when they could equally achieve a better experience without it.

ianlevesque 12y ago

And what's even better is that Angular is throwing everything out an starting over with 2.0.

thekingshorses 12y ago
Well, they don't know that! All our servers (API/DB) are slow, and they think that Angular will free up resource (Because not rendering on servers), and using "free" client resource to render, it will be fast.

IkmoIkmo 12y ago

> At my previous job, site was rendering on server. It was old, and we wanted to redesign it. I wanted to keep rendering on the server. CTO and VP wanted to build Angular site because everyone is moving to Angular and its easy to find Angular developers. Company's 30+% of new visitors comes through SEO. I think I missed the point of your second paragraph, I'd be interested to know what you meant to say. (currently working with Angular on a small hybrid app and thought about experimenting with it on the web but SEO concerns were the first thing that came to mind, so it feels like a relevant piece to me!)

lstamour 12y ago
The implication is that without server-side rendering, SEO would drop. This isn't actually true for Google (edit: sometimes!), since it executes JavaScript, in part to prevent SEO gaming of its platform. But it would likely harm other web crawlers unless care was taken to incrementally add Angular to the existing HTML pre-rendered, or to execute the Angular.js server-side for bots and a nice page load speedup.
- mikermcneil 12y ago
  @lstamour Careful! We tested this theory last Fall with sailsjs.org and it turned out to be patently false-- we went from the second result when you google "Node.js framework" to not even being present. When I turned our headless browser snapshot stuff on again about a month later (we use brombone), it worked itself out. Needless to say, sucks :/ But everyone should be aware of the reality.
  - lstamour 12y ago
    Sorry, that's true. I should have been a bit less forceful on that one. I know personally that there's a lot which goes into Google's rankings -- for instance: mobile optimization, SSL, and (where JS can slow things down the most) page speed. Google wants the web to be fast, and if two websites have identical rankings, it will rank the faster one higher. Waiting on JavaScript delays the "time to visible content" by a significant amount.
- danneu 12y ago
  From my experience, the state of javascript for what's ostensibly the best web crawler in the world is still "it might work".
- thekingshorses 12y ago
  I know google is experimenting but I have never seen any JS rendered page in the google search result. My mobile hacker news client http://hn.premii.com/ http://hn.premii.com/ ranks top on Google but not because of the content. Content is not indexed by Google.

youngtaff 12y ago

>At my previous job, site was rendering on server. It was old, >and we wanted to redesign it. I wanted to keep rendering on >the server. CTO and VP wanted to build Angular site because >everyone is moving to Angular and its easy to find Angular >developers. Company's 30+% of new visitors comes through SEO. IMV most people don't understand the tradeoff's they're making when they adopt Angular - I'm seeing plenty of sites that have huge start up times due to them using Angular when they could equally achieve a better experience without it.