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0 pointsnormloman11y ago0 comments

Thanks for answering my question. Would you mind clarifying it for me?

If your blog has a reusable template, wouldn't the images, fonts, and stylesheets that are part of the template get cached on the user's computer, regardless of whether it was dynamic or static?

Or are you talking about caching things serverside?

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4 comments · 1 top-level

Xorlev11y ago· 3 in thread

I think he means that you can cache the majority of the page (including the HTML template) and then substitute in just the data (usually coming from JSON). I don't buy that it's more efficient personally. I'd rather resend a lightweight page on every time then force the browser to download it all, load the JS, then build a page and have the browser draw that.

It seems to me that single-page apps are great when you aren't leaving the page and have a lot of navigation, but overkill for a blog.

I am rather interested in react+react-router though. That seems like the best of both worlds -- render serverside, then render deltas clientside.

klibertp11y ago

There's one technology, available everywhere including most toasters, which allows you to do this (cache HTML template and just substitute the data) and it can work on both back- and frontend with no problems, is crazy fast and even leaves you with something readable when it breaks.

It's called XML with XSLT.

Somehow it isn't very popular. But hey, we got this idea of "rendering pages on the backend or the frontend (or both)" from the same code lately!

gizzlon11y ago

> It's called XML with XSLT.

But that can only generate XML/XHTML, right?

Also, fast compared to what? Many options are fast if all you do is replacing some values. Static pages can just be written out from memory or disk, a whole nother level of fast :)

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alexsop211y ago

I’ve gone down this rabbit hole and aside from fluid navigation, it isn’t worth the hassle. Since the content is largely text which will be transformed into HTML (before or after being sent down the pipe), the size difference is mostly negligible.

Time is better spent cleaning up the critical rendering path, deferring styles and scripts.

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