I certainly could make the titles more useful, in fact due to you suggestion I've just committed a fix to that.
I'm interested though, why do you think it's useful for users to read meta descriptions? Or the raw text used by spiders?
How does making this a pure JavaScript web app degrade the end-user's experience? I think I can effectively argue the opposite - that JS and client-side rendering makes for a much better experience.
If we were to take two web apps, one using a rendr-style-render-on-server approach ( https://github.com/airbnb/rendr ), and one using a blank-html-bootstrap-through-js approach, the rendr-style app will win out for time-to-first interaction.
To take a specific example, loading the monocle home page gives a base html time of 355ms for me. setup.js takes another 570ms.
All told, it's an initial load of 355ms vs 970ms. Or "close to instant" vs "is something wrong? oh no, it's good".
It isn't, really. I made a mistake and thought that every page (served to users and search engines) had the same title and description. A user is unlikely to read a meta description, unless he/she is on a search results page.
>How does making this a pure JavaScript web app degrade the end-user's experience?
NoScript users and special need users are unable to access your website's content.
> JS and client-side rendering makes for a much better experience.
Agreed. Progressive enhancement makes this possible and get the best of both worlds: Accessible content for NoScript users, spiffy JS rendering one page app for JavaScript users. RMS can even download your pages through Lynx.
If you go pure JavaScript, you can at least add a <noscript> where you explain why you need JavaScript to enjoy this site.
[Accessibility] often focuses on people with disabilities or special needs.Though such an obvious error is hopefully always ignored.