Best practice: loading rendered html or json?

Question

Hey folks, I have a question which feels stupid but I can't quite say why.

Background:

Imagine a webapp with users and tags. Users tag each other.

I've got one page in the app which displays details about a single tag in relation to a single user. Let's say user 'bob' and tag 'footag'. On this page, I'm displaying two lists: all the people who have tagged bob with 'footag' and all the people bob has tagged 'footag'. let's call these <div id="received'> and <div id="sent">

Let's say the url for this view is /users/bob/tags/footag

Naturally, these lists are long -- I don't want to load the whole list upon pageview. So I load the first ten for each.

The question

Now I can provide dynamic paging for each of the lists in one of two ways:

1. Get the data for the next 10 users as json. Write js to render this data, replacing the contents of the div.
2. Get a rendered "snippet" of html from another well defined URL on my server, say /users/bob/tags/footag/received?page=1. I fetch it asynchronously and just replace the contents of the relevant <div>.

So in one case I fetch data and render it via JS in the browser, the other I fetch rendered data and just plonk it wholesale into the document.

Is there any reason not to use #2? I can't imagine one but I suppose there might be security aspects I'm not considering, or performance, or something else. I'd much prefer to do #2 as it simplifies my life significantly.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've got an app like this -- I use both methods.

I use your Method #1 to update fields that aren't contiguous (e.g. input fields all over the place), but I use your Method #2 to update tabular data, kind of like your lists.

I would stick to #2 for your case.

Answer 2

i'd go with #1 ... so you really get the data, not just some HTML ... it will simply be a concise JavaScript object structure and not some string, so you can evaluate the data at will, cache it, use it for searches, etc. ... the more work is done on the client side, and the cleverer it is, the better you app scales ... you have 1 server, or maybe 2-10, or i don't know, but you have 10-10000 more clients ...

greetz

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