Why I chose Clojure/CouchDB for a new site • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I chose Clojure/CouchDB for a new site

#31

Post by anr » Thu, Feb 26, 2009, 2:05 AM UTC

asmosoinio wrote: post #4

Interesting idea, serving all HTML static and combining that on client side with the dynamic content using JavaScript. And having a pure JSON server. Sounds ground breaking to me, anyone know of other sites/frameworks that would work like this?

Apparently it is a trend with FP guys :-)

HAppS (a Haskell framework) has also advocated this:

"HAppS does not come with a server-side templating system. We prefer the pattern of developing static web pages and using AJAX to populate them with dynamic content."

http://happs.org/

Re: Why I chose Clojure/CouchDB for a new site

#32

Post by patio11 » Thu, Feb 26, 2009, 3:05 AM UTC

liminalist wrote: post #22

patio11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of supporting clients with disabled Javascript increases constantly. As Javascript frameworks get increasingly feature-rich, regular users expect more out of their Internet experience, and development techniques mature, it gets easier and more mandatory to do more in Javascript and harder and more expensive to fake the presence of comparable functionality using HTML, forms, etc. The revenue generated by sup…

As long as you're fine with web crawlers not seeing your content, people not building mashups based on your HTML, and so forth, be as much of a heartless bastard as you want. But do keep in mind that Googlebot is the biggest disabled user in the world. If blind people can't see it, search engines can't see it. And if search engines can't see your website, who cares about you?

people not building mashups based on your HTML

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Hypothetically assuming I had a product targeted at people who were technically capable of developing mashups (or, for that matter, had ever heard the word), I would want to have them use a published API rather than my HTML, because I routinely need to change my HTML. I do not want to have to give everyone 6 weeks of notice every time I do a split test to avoid breaking my core users' sites.

Re: Why I chose Clojure/CouchDB for a new site

#33

Post by allertonm » Thu, Feb 26, 2009, 4:19 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #20

icey wrote: post #11

So if the user has javascript disabled, nothing on the site works?

The costs of supporting clients with disabled Javascript increases constantly. As Javascript frameworks get increasingly feature-rich, regular users expect more out of their Internet experience, and development techniques mature, it gets easier and more mandatory to do more in Javascript and harder and more expensive to fake the presence of comparable functionality using HTML, forms, etc. The revenue generated by sup…

I wonder about the assertion that this approach would prevent blind people from using a site. I'm not up to speed on the current state of the art of screenreaders for the blind (last time I looked they were still running on DOS) but it would surprise me if they weren't looking at the DOM that resulted from loading the page in a regular browser, rather than reading the HTML directly. If that were the case, all of the javascript stuff should "just work". Anyone know better?

Re: Why I chose Clojure/CouchDB for a new site

#34

Post by gnaritas » Thu, Feb 26, 2009, 4:28 AM UTC

liminalist wrote: post #22

patio11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of supporting clients with disabled Javascript increases constantly. As Javascript frameworks get increasingly feature-rich, regular users expect more out of their Internet experience, and development techniques mature, it gets easier and more mandatory to do more in Javascript and harder and more expensive to fake the presence of comparable functionality using HTML, forms, etc. The revenue generated by sup…

As long as you're fine with web crawlers not seeing your content, people not building mashups based on your HTML, and so forth, be as much of a heartless bastard as you want. But do keep in mind that Googlebot is the biggest disabled user in the world. If blind people can't see it, search engines can't see it. And if search engines can't see your website, who cares about you?

If I want people building mashups with my site, I'll provide an API, HTML is not an API.

If I want Google to see my data, I'll provide it to them when they crawl, more accurately, if I'm ajaxing in data with JavaScript, it's usually explicitly because I don't want crawlers getting to it.

It is not a web developers job to go out of his way to support people who deliberately break their browsers and more often than not contribute very little to the bottom line. Most of us are building apps for people that actually want to use them as intended.

Re: Why I chose Clojure/CouchDB for a new site

#35

Post by gnaritas » Thu, Feb 26, 2009, 4:32 AM UTC

Hexstream wrote: post #30

patio11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of supporting clients with disabled Javascript increases constantly. As Javascript frameworks get increasingly feature-rich, regular users expect more out of their Internet experience, and development techniques mature, it gets easier and more mandatory to do more in Javascript and harder and more expensive to fake the presence of comparable functionality using HTML, forms, etc. The revenue generated by sup…

"it gets easier and more mandatory to do more in Javascript and harder and more expensive to fake the presence of comparable functionality using HTML, forms, etc." You don't have to "fake the presence of comparable functionality" (and in most cases you simply can't ). What you can and should do is support the subset of functionality raw HTML and CSS sans Javascript can achieve. No one will blame you for not supportin…

> What you can and should do is support the...

Bullshit, the only thing we should do is whatever the bottom line requires. 99.9% of users don't break their browsers on purpose, so you lose very little and save a ton of time and effort by simply not choosing to go the extra mile for those pesky few that try and break your site.