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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

Easier said than done if you're using something like Angular or Ember.

If angular or ember make it difficult to follow best practices, are they the best tool for the job?

Less trollishly, although I have no experience with angular or ember, I have built a progressively enhanced application with knockout and I thought it went quite well. As with any progressively enhanced application, it requires that your back-end is set up to respond with both markup and JSON responses, but the data- attributes responsible for binding behaviour are just ignored by the browser when script is not running.

Perhaps my experience is too simplistic, though. Can you give me an example of the kind of things that angular and ember make difficult to progressively enhance?

Yehuda Katz, the lead on Ember.js was categorical about the use of ember.js when you require progressive enhancement: Don't use ember.js.

So this is just a case of using the wrong tools for the job, buying the hype without validating the requirements.

Don't you generally use those for web apps where SEO and search engine indexation is less important? I'm not very experienced in this area, so I find it hard to think of an example where you need indexation/SEO-optimization for the kinds of things you do with Angular or Ember.

I'm very curious to hear of some examples.

Content sites should be able to take advantage of javascript technologies more fully. It's all about user experience in the end. There's all sorts of new ways of navigating or presenting content that isn't just a static document after static document. In these cases, SEO is a requirement.

Ah, good point.

And come to think of it, I'm working on a basic blog and I'm using javascript (react.js, specifically) to make the client-side experiences smoother... I had completely forgotten about that.

Thanks for the insight.

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