So, going back at least 18 months, maybe more, there has been a long slow-running conversation amongst us about what we render were, with different projects choosing different answers.
I think we have enough data now, that we can consolidate on a good default answer and ask that everyone pick that answers *by default* with variation needing to be experiments - explicit decisions to learn something new. tl;dr: lets: * render searchable content on server side and client side using a common template language * render the forms needed to file a bug server side and optionally client side * render all other forms exclusively client side and have them communicate exclusively via the API Currently we render most content server side (even things returned via the API are often rendered server side to HTML: aieeeeee); this often has performance issues (and see the separate discussion about templating engines for other considerations). But, nearly all our users have solid javascript browsers - browsers that can easily support tools like handlebars. In our efforts to provide a smooth experience for users via client side logic, we're ending up reimplementing many things two or three times (client side, API, python views). This is a lot of overhead and not intrinsically beneficial. We have an existing constraint from Ubuntu that headless Ubuntu server installs be able to report defects; beyond that we have no need to support anything other than users regular desktop browsers (in all their varied glory). We do need to support a11y, but client side rendering that adds stuff to the DOM usually handles that no worse than what we do today. Client side rendering helps ensure that our API meets all the needs of our webapp, rather than being a second cousin which we update sometimes. Making client side rendering an easier project choice (by removing the duplicate work of doing client side rendering and server side rendering) should then also benefit our launchpadlib users. Google won't index javascript-rendered content (at least, that is their official position) - they recommend folk have a server side rendered version of anything they need indexed. So we'd want to render anything that should get indexed (e.g. /~flacoste, or /ubuntu/+source/gcc etc) on the server still, but we can use a common template, and a common initial-data-assembly routine (the lp cache in the view) to only write that once. (Yes, this assumes being indexed by big search engines matters... a separate and interesting debate, but currently we assume it does, and though I may be prejudging such a discussion, I think it still matters). Whatdoyouallthink? -Rob _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : launchpad-dev@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
