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Comment by andycroll | Hacker News Reader

I still find myself worrying about the 'app-ness' of lots of JS in a web application. Think it's derived from my web standards background.

Twitter is my least favorite site in this respect.

No idea what this means for of Basecamp Next, as there's no actual code yet, but in my own work I like to make sure that no-JS doesn't necessarily mean no-functionality.

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Andy, Basecamp Next does not have a one-screen app feel at all. We're still all about separate pages.

But we do rely heavily on JS for functionality, so it won't work without it.

In an ideal world I'd like non-JS fallbacks but I'm torn as to whether I'm being too 'old school' or stuck in a 'progressive enhancement' approach more suited to a web site rather than a web app.

I suspect it comes down to the project and the trade offs therein. I'm no code zealot.

I'm presuming you're serving just desktop interface to start as well? No responsive or mobile at launch?

The UI has been designed to work great on tablets and it also works pretty well on a phone (albeit a tad crammed). We'll probably do something more dedicated for mobile after launch.

I'm building an app in a very similar manner to what I've read about Basecamp Next. When you move to the new model with a payload of code, and then json reqests from there, it's blazingly fast, and so much more gratifying to zoom around the site as no full page re-renders have to happen. You wouldn't like native apps refreshing on ever transition of state.

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