Comment by lukeholder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukeholder | Hacker News Reader

Something I thought was very interesting was the thoughts (augments) around pure single page apps vs. progressive enhancement. I think Yehuda almost flat out said its too much work to do progressive enhancement. (rendering views / view partials on the server)

Progressive enhancement I think has really become a law of moses in recent times, probably mainly due to the speed in which browsers have progressed, and the powerful browsers on all modern phones - it just isn't practical.

To be honest, I think having your app work without javascript these days is a little naive view about the future of the web. Javascript is here to stay and not that many people will be on non javascript powered browsers.

Which also persuades me to really care even less about the semantic web. Twitter bootstrap is a good example - it really is DIVitis, but really who cares? its rapid application development, it make the web look and act far nicer and more consistent, and it progresses the web as a platform.

Having your web app still work (through non Ajax'd GET, POST etc) for the 7 seconds it takes to download the javascript just isn't worth it - especially with html5.

I think it's about more than just pain vs. gain.

Unless your web application happens to actually be a series of <form>s, your JavaScript probably starts to become your content. To use an example from today, how would one go about building this without JavaScript? Without losing the heart of it in the translation to static HTML?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/20...

exactly! why should we have that visualization be backed by a html table within the page? Especially when you probably have that data backed by an API anyway that could probably server up json, xml or whatever else.

Why? Because not everybody is a human with 20/20 vision sitting in front of a monitor.

Before I go off on to much of a rant, I do want to clarify - having the javascript be the content is fine for a special 'once off' page like the one in the grandparent post. In this case its probably replacing a flash animation. Its also fine for applications where you have a tight handle on the people and devices which will use it.

However as a general practice its a bad idea. A few very important cases that this breaks:

* The googlebot and archive.org

* Vision impaired users

* Services such as readability and instapaper

All of these could be better served by having a symantec table of data, which is then then enhanced and presented in a different manner by javascript.

I can't believe you're being downvoted, this is exactly why progressive enhancement can't be abandoned. As someone with poor vision, I've found most of the crap HN thinks is 'cute' to be completely unusable. The modern web is a huge pain to use, it was actually /better/ in 2005 than it is now, from a usability perspective. This is very scary, considering the renewed emphasis on good UI/UX.

The saving grace is that the 2012 internet has excellent mobile sites (they suck on mobile with user-scalable=0 or maximum-scale=1, but on a desktop browser things flow excellently).

Sadly you're sane understanding doesn't jive with the HN echo chamber, but you're spot-on. The web is more than just tech demos.

Good points but I don't think witholding progress to support these services is a good idea.

The solution is to come up with best-practices and tools that allow both interactive and static versions to exist in tandem, with minimal overhead.

Catering to lowest common denominator means technology, for all humans, lags behind. This is a massive issue. Either the tools for consuming static content (e.g. google bot) need to evolve to embrace the modern internet, OR we need to produce simple tools for dynamic sites that transparently serve the static content for services that require it.

That said, there's a lot of simple elegance in a straight html page.

Careful, you are arguing progress for the sake of it. If it does not serve a lowest common denominator it's probably not worth it and only fancy.

Slightly interesting in this context: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9_6G8J6VJg (applications of simple sms based services covering Kenya)

You’re talking about “content” sites rather than interactive applications.

It doesn’t make any sense to present a chat client or a multiplayer game or a data driven map or a vector drawing program as a set of hyperlinked pages. Googlebot, archive.org, instapaper, etc. wouldn’t really get much useful from such applications anyway.

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