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Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

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Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#21

Post by NocturnalWaffle »

ommunist wrote: post #14

I guess this technology is promising in a way that it delivers websites to be read by humans only, not the bots. I fail to recognise the practical use of it unless building the most unknown blog in the world, since obviously site on cmsjs is not going to be indexed by google like your ordinary wordpress blog. But, there is something to it. Something important. Blog for humans, readable only by humans, kinda timely in…

Google has been able to handle javascript in pages for a while now: http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascri...

Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#22

Post by NocturnalWaffle »

zwetan wrote: post #9
ivansavz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. My guess is it will be OK for the text, but links will be out of whack so bots won't really "crawl" the site. Then again, maybe advanced bots will run the js? also, I know words in h-tags are usually "counted" as more important, so that logic won't work with raw .md

what text ? there is no text, the page is empty, the linking is not the first priority at this point a robot to be able to read the text would already need to run the js in the first place but the concept is interesting let's do a CONTENT management system but be completely invisible to any search bots so our CONTENT never ever get referenced and searchable on the Internet

Google has been able to handle javascript in pages for a while now.. http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascri...

Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#23

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

zwetan wrote: post #8
tuananh wrote: post #4

does it affect site's SEO?

do a view source and take a guess, off course it will affect the SEO but hey no problem it's JS, so to correct that SEO problem they will probably do a whole render of the page server-side with something like PhamtomJS and serve those "special" pages to bots which I think is totally insane

Google renders JavaScript when it crawls.

Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#24

Post by thallian »

ommunist wrote: post #14

I guess this technology is promising in a way that it delivers websites to be read by humans only, not the bots. I fail to recognise the practical use of it unless building the most unknown blog in the world, since obviously site on cmsjs is not going to be indexed by google like your ordinary wordpress blog. But, there is something to it. Something important. Blog for humans, readable only by humans, kinda timely in…

You could use something like casperjs (http://casperjs.org/) for a bot (I did this to scrape a proboards forum, worked quite well).

Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#25

Post by rimantas »

EvanPlaice wrote: post #12
userbinator wrote: post #6

I know there seem to be two rather large groups on HN, one for proliferation of JS and one against, but at the very least if someone from the latter visits your site, please show something better than an entirely blank page . (I'm speaking of the demo, not the actual site describing it --- although I thought it would be hosted with itself.) As for the idea of turning static content sites into client-side JS-rendered…

> an entirely blank page That's only true if you use 'view source'. If you open up dev tools, all of the elements are rendered in full and live updated as they change. Client-side rendered apps are quickly becoming every-where rendered apps. They can now work isomorphically, on the desktop, and on mobile. > every single visitor has to regenerate it on their machine This is a false premise. For server-side view render…

  > They can now work isomorphically, on the desktop, and on
  > mobile.
So can plain HTML. Without any needless scripting.

  > We're moving past the days of the static web.
We are not. Maybe you are, we can wait till you come back.

  > Especially, now that it's trivial to pull data from many
  > different sources on the client-side.
HTML is even more trivial.

Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#26

Post by sergiotapia »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #23
zwetan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do a view source and take a guess, off course it will affect the SEO but hey no problem it's JS, so to correct that SEO problem they will probably do a whole render of the page server-side with something like PhamtomJS and serve those "special" pages to bots which I think is totally insane

Google renders JavaScript when it crawls.

Source please.

Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#27

Post by voidr »

EvanPlaice wrote: post #12
userbinator wrote: post #6

I know there seem to be two rather large groups on HN, one for proliferation of JS and one against, but at the very least if someone from the latter visits your site, please show something better than an entirely blank page . (I'm speaking of the demo, not the actual site describing it --- although I thought it would be hosted with itself.) As for the idea of turning static content sites into client-side JS-rendered…

> an entirely blank page That's only true if you use 'view source'. If you open up dev tools, all of the elements are rendered in full and live updated as they change. Client-side rendered apps are quickly becoming every-where rendered apps. They can now work isomorphically, on the desktop, and on mobile. > every single visitor has to regenerate it on their machine This is a false premise. For server-side view render…

Caching cannot help you with initial page loads, which is probably important when you have a content focused sites.

Rendering the content via JavaScript is slower than just having it in your HTML. It's true that JS execution has become insanely fast, however, initial JS execution is not as fast, because it requires that JIT to kick in. Even if JS execution becomes infinitely fast, you still have to work with the DOM, which is horribly slow and there are no known ways to make it fast. Google, Yahoo and others have prove with hard numbers that users care about speed, even when we are talking about milliseconds.

I highly recommend doing some research on how browsers and caching actually work before falling into the pit of false belief.

Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#29

Post by ry_ry »

voidr wrote: post #27
EvanPlaice wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an entirely blank page That's only true if you use 'view source'. If you open up dev tools, all of the elements are rendered in full and live updated as they change. Client-side rendered apps are quickly becoming every-where rendered apps. They can now work isomorphically, on the desktop, and on mobile. > every single visitor has to regenerate it on their machine This is a false premise. For server-side view render…

Caching cannot help you with initial page loads, which is probably important when you have a content focused sites. Rendering the content via JavaScript is slower than just having it in your HTML. It's true that JS execution has become insanely fast, however, initial JS execution is not as fast, because it requires that JIT to kick in. Even if JS execution becomes infinitely fast, you still have to work with the DOM,…

To be fair to him, he did specifically mention isomorphic, in which case the js is running on both sides and the idea is that initial load delivers server-generated markup, giving the user content immediately then doing all the databinding later.

Also, tricks like that are what users generally recognise as speed - similarly Twitter's optimistic xhr submission appears to work instantly, then goes off and actually does it's thing retrospectively.

Fwiw I think a fully client side js cms app is a moderately rubbish idea for a variety of reasons, but js rendering of dynamic content absolutely has merit.

It's a little more nuanced than slamming somebody's 'pit of false belief' because they like client view rendering. :)

Re: Show HN: CMS.js – Fully Client-Side JavaScript Site Generator

#30

Post by unicornporn »

TiddlyWiki[1], which is a wiki more than a "CMS", has been doing something very close to this for quite some time. I used it for years, but eventually switched back to plain text files for notes.

I use Jekyll for blogging and generating my portfolio site too, but right now I can only update my those from my own laptop with my Jekyll install which is not always great. CMS.js would be something else... My dream would be a simple PHP based CMS for my Jekyll install though.

[1] http://tiddlywiki.com/

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