The Need for Speed | Hacker News Reader

The Need for Speed

cloudup.com

20 pointsRauchg11 comments

It's interesting you advertise the need for speed when your page is so heavy it's giving my machine a hard time

Maybe blog posts aren't the target of serious optimization for any of dozens of good reasons a smart person like you could guess?

That's probably the most successful use of slides in a post I've ever seen, usually when people add a deck in their write-up it makes the experience awful, so kudos.

Do you predict that major sites are going get re-written as single-page apps, either in Node or just Javascript? Are there any examples of major sites that have done total redos as single page apps? (you use the FB app as an example, but I'm thinking like an Amazon or HootSuite or any major webapp).

My sense is that there will be a lot of new sites written as single page apps, but the switching cost for an existing site seems super high.

edit: missing words

Cost of switching is definitely high if you were to rewrite from scratch, but the transition to single-page can also be evolutionary. That's exactly the approach we're taking for the Wordpress admin panel for example.

Disable javascript for the page and get no text. What happend to graceful degredation?

There's nothing on the page but a few logos and JS. The page is just a bit of script that loads data from AWS. Even if you "view source", there's no text to see. So "graceful degradation" means you see everything on the page that isn't script :)

Disabling JavaScript is silly in 2013.

Using HTTP to download javascript that then does an AJAX request to fetch static content that is converted by javascript to HTML. Is silly in any year. It's also quite slow (which is ironic for a page talking about improving responsiveness)

Any pointers on how to make the site visible to search engines when the delivery is as a single page app that does everything in JS? I know google's crawler can run the JS, but any notes on how far that can go?

Can't browse with Firefox 17.0.10 (The newest ESR Release)....

The video will be released in the next few days! :)

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