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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Is it OK? Who cares? As long as you solve the problem for your customer, it doesn't matter that much.

That said, I find server-side rendering to be more difficult when faced with the problem of creating the type of UI that people want these days. Generally I like the server to just be an API that a Javascript client talks to, because unless you want no dynamic/asynchronous features you're going to have to write that anyway. Now you're maintaining two apps, which is twice as much work. Sometimes it's necessary to do that, sometimes it's not... I always aim for only writing one UI, because it's like twice as fast as writing two. But no doubt people will reply to me saying they browse with Javascript disabled to get an extra 15 minutes of battery life out of their laptop, so there's that.

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I browse with JS disabled by default because of shoddy ad networks and incredibly annoying dynamic effects on websites. (I go to like 5 websites on my phone because of how unusable the internet is without blocking that nonsense.)

Now, I may not be the target audience for your app, and that's fine, but it's unfair to dismiss people browsing without JS for strawman reasons.

Why not use an ad blocker?

Why not both?

I can use several things.

Adblockers generally do two things: block specific domains and change the rendering of certain elements.

Browsing with JS disabled handles things like stopping certain kinds of code -- even loaded from the primary domain -- from running.

Layered defense usually works better than a single method, and advertisers, privacy violators, etc have shown a willingness to enter a full on arms race. So I responded in similar measure.

The honest truth is I just don't want to do business with most people trying to run code on my computer, so if that's a sticking point for them on using their product, I just don't use it.

Good point

I use a crowd-sourced hosts file on my system to block most of the ad-networks and metrics tracking sites.

Check out https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Well, for what it's worth, I get a lot more than 15 minutes and my browsing experience in general is just incredibly fast and smooth. :) It also affords me the ability to not be paranoid about whether there's anything malicious on the page.

If I'm expecting some kind of webapp then I'm fine with whitelisting your domain, though if you're basically just a content just I usually just browse away.

I confess I don't really understand your point though: In what sense would you be maintaining two apps? Aren't you ultimately maintaining exactly the same amount of code, if not more, the case just being that yours isn't as tightly coupled across a network?

You're maintaining two apps anyway b/c there is the client and the server. The OP didn't say it explicitly, but I'm assuming they are already building the server side no matter what and need to at a frontend. The backend development already builds a bunch of objects that will need to partially reimplemented in the frontend. It's just a matter of how many of them.

My two cents (to the OP) is that you should consider the people or teams building the thing. If you have one team doing all frontend and backend, doing it (almost) all server side makes sense. If you have a dedicated person doing the frontend, commit to a js framework and make a good API to the backend. Certainly don't make a frontend JS guru render html in Java or .NET.

I browse with Javascript turned off because it cripples ads and reduces memory usage of my browser significantly.

I don't care what you think is necessary to serve a page of information. It almost certainly isn't. You have to earn the right to have javascript enabled or I'll just click away.

I browse with JavaScript disabled to avoid advertising.

It has the added side benefit of being a quality filter: if the site won't load properly or fallback gracefully without JavaScript enabled then it probably isn't worth my time.

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