I'm having a brain freeze here. How do you render a DOM on the server and then push it out to the client? Convert in memory DOM to a text/html representation before sending?
That's old school way. Sometimes old ways are presented as new, which confuses me.
> then capture the outerHTML of an element as an HTML string to serve
That makes sense. Do the fancy building on the server and then convert it for transport
> React.js
That sounds interesting. You answered my question enough that I can do more research. Thanks.
To iterate a point in the article, a number of client-heavy sites built on Angular and Ember have been rendering their content on the server-side to be presented to crawlers like the Googlebot for SEO purposes.
It's returned in the request as HTML if the USER_AGENT matches Googlebot just like it would in a normally non-SPA web app.
If a crawler executes the web page without a full Javascript context it will miss out on the intended content.