Transforming a major website into a javascript application [closed]

Question

I would appreciate your opinions. I have been put in charge to redevelop a major site that does quite a bit of traffic. As of the past few months, I have been using Backbone.js to develop applications. I have been researching the last couple of weeks on whether Backbone would be a good fit for the redevelopment of the new site.

My initial concern was SEO. Found a great post here that talks about progressive enhancement and a bunch of stackoverflow questions that have helped to. I can't seem to shake the feeling that building a static site and enhancing it with Backbone is quite a feat and will take much more time.

Now my question is, have we not passed the stage where we have to build sites that have to work with javascript disabled? Is it essential that our site is still functional for screen-readers etc?

My idea was to serve the relevant meta seo information from the server into my main app.html file so search engines will still be able to crawl the different urls. The Backbone app will be launched from whatever url you visit that is relevant to the app.

I have just visited the new hulu.com, and cant seem to come up with a reason as to why not re-develop the website into a Backbone application. Most if not all websites I have visited, will not function without js. Go to hulu.com with js disabled and you will be able to see what I mean. So in closing is it safe to build a website that will not function without js and will the above suffice for SEO?

Thank you

Answer 1

I think there will be a lot of opinions on this. Here's mine.

As a default mind setting I always find backward-compatibility and graceful fallback important. I normally believe a site should be able to fulfill it's main purpose: delivering content (content sells).

However.. what if the purpose aka content is delivering some kind of functionality, like a online calculator or drawing application.. Then the user would already need and expect things like javascript to be enabled. In those cases I'll happily make design/layout things easer on me, using javascript. Think of a site like jsfiddle: who would care if this site didn't display it's ui properly because javascript was disabled.. Nobody.

As to SEO: I think there are a lot things that influence this. If you sell apples and you own the domain apples.com, your pretty much set anyway. Again, content sells, that is how most engines try to index.

Apart from that, in this (horrible) day and internet age, the most popular search-engines will both filter and rank the search-results to the user.. so if one wants to optimize a site for the search engine.. then for who's personal bubble (search results) do you try to optimize?!?.

I have more faith in something that was semantically coded, maintainable and has a pretty stable foreseeable future (instead of having to rebuild the same thing over and over again, every 6 months or so). Simpler put: make the core/base 'simple' enough to 'always' be rendered in a useful way and then add the spice using javascript and css-edge-technology to flavor the content.

Answer 2

Have you looked into node.js at all? Since your porting the view rendering to javascript anyways. It would be a little friendlier to have more components speaking the same language. Plus the asynchronous processing model releases a lot of server stress that threaded processes usually cause. Threaded processes spend a lot of time (and power) waiting to execute. But in javascript, folks usually set up callback methods. So instead of waiting for the previous process to finish, node just leaves behind a callback method to be executed when needed, meanwhile the rest of the application is still going full speed ahead.

node is really light too. You can use it along side other server side technologies and it wont take up much space. It has some pretty powerful features, but, personally, I find it best for view rendering (it's javascript after all). It also makes setting up servers and routing reeeaally easy. So setting up the stuff you mention in your 4th paragraph would be a sinch.

Anyways, that's my 2 cents.