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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

I can't read the site (there's nothing in HTML) but is this a framework that doesn't produce pages viewable without JavaScript? If it is against HTML, my vote is against it.

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I'm against this too. Why do we want Javascript engines serving simple text pages instead of HTML? What about accessibility? Look at the source code of the linked article. What would a screenreader user encounter if they visited this page?

Pardon the pun, but that old chestnut? Contemporary screen-readers implementing WAI-ARIA (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria) work with javascript web applications.

Ever tried the above site with the screen readers? The sites produced with Meteor? I claim it would be easier for most of the programmers to generate HTML representation than to implement support for that. HTML is basics. Everybody can test it: just turn off JavaScript.

"Contemporary screen-readers implementing WAI-ARIA...work with javascript web applications."

This isn't a web application though (in terms of interactivity), it's a plain text page. Why do we want Javascript to serve plain text pages like this?

Also, on the WAI-ARIA site, the expectation seems to be that Javascript is used for dynamic content or widgets (for which there are Aria-roles), but that HTML is used for text content (correct me if I'm wrong about this).

Again, if you look at the source code of this page, I can't see how it would be accessible.

http://docs.meteor.com/#spiderable

Could this could be used if the browser does not support JS?

It's just designed for search machines, they probably want to sniff user agent instead of generating HTML for every page request.

Yes, and you can control a list of user agents that it activates for.

Assuming that google-bot has its own user agent isn't the excuse for not generating the HTML for the people who want to read the site.

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