Re:Why node.js disappoints me
by neilk on Monday September 27, 2010 @11:36AM
(#1732029)
Nothing about the idea requires abandoning HTML for content.
However, something like login management could be completely handled by an API. So the browser would be combining different sources of HTML into once package. This is pretty much what is happening with the Facebook "Like" button anyway.
There are a lot of sites out there which serve pages which are mostly static content with just a little bit extra -- the login name at the top, personalized tools here and there.
I happen to work with Wikipedia content, so that's top of my mind right now. If you are logged in, we give you content rendered mostly from scratch, since the caching system is optimized for the non-logged-in user and there are user preferences which might transform the content in complicated ways. (Even things like date formats are subject to user preferences, so it's considerably harder to cache). This works okay, but it's dramatically more expensive for logged in users. We would have to rethink things if we ever got to a world where a lot more people are logged in.
A paradigm I'd like to explore would be to fetch the static content from one set of servers, and login state and personal options and other transformations from another, and get the browser to combine it all. Probably won't ever happen on Wikipedia though, at least not soon.
However, something like login management could be completely handled by an API. So the browser would be combining different sources of HTML into once package. This is pretty much what is happening with the Facebook "Like" button anyway.
There are a lot of sites out there which serve pages which are mostly static content with just a little bit extra -- the login name at the top, personalized tools here and there.
I happen to work with Wikipedia content, so that's top of my mind right now. If you are logged in, we give you content rendered mostly from scratch, since the caching system is optimized for the non-logged-in user and there are user preferences which might transform the content in complicated ways. (Even things like date formats are subject to user preferences, so it's considerably harder to cache). This works okay, but it's dramatically more expensive for logged in users. We would have to rethink things if we ever got to a world where a lot more people are logged in.
A paradigm I'd like to explore would be to fetch the static content from one set of servers, and login state and personal options and other transformations from another, and get the browser to combine it all. Probably won't ever happen on Wikipedia though, at least not soon.