Building HTML with templates versus building it in javascript?

Please, don't use Javascript to layout your pages. Only use it where it is needed Despite recent enhancements and standardizations, Javascript is still typically slow, difficult to be completely compatible (think old IE and others), and not so compatible with some screen readers and scrapers/search engines If you can do it by returning straight-up HTML, then that is typically the way you want to go.

Please, don't use Javascript to layout your pages. Only use it where it is needed. Despite recent enhancements and standardizations, Javascript is still typically slow, difficult to be completely compatible (think old IE and others), and not so compatible with some screen readers and scrapers/search engines.

If you can do it by returning straight-up HTML, then that is typically the way you want to go.

Not to mention that any content you hide behind client-side scripting will be invisible to search engines. – bobince Nov 21 '10 at 20:25 @bobince, that's what I meant by scrapers. I have clarified the post.

– Brad Nov 21 '10 at 20:29 Javascript is needed for my current uses - I'm making applications with quite dynamic pages, requiring a fair amount of client-side javascript anyway (for highlighting, selecting, updating without rerendering the whole page etc. ). And this isn't content that I want search engines to find anyway. – Emile Nov 30 '10 at 16:56.

There's a slightly related question here. You could possibly use the same templates for both - this library looks intersting. You could render templates only on the server... the question on top has a way to do it efficiently.

You could duplicate certain templates in javascript if necessary - try jqtemplate. Personally I would probably render HTML only on the server side, to avoid template duplication. I would do JS templates if my server acted as more of a JSON web service, possibly also serving other clients.

That said, if your site being accessible and non-js friendly is important to you (it should be) then write your site fully without js, and then progressively enhance it.

What you're saying makes me think that maybe my server is more of a JSON web service, or at least some parts of it are. That's not a distinction I'm used to making (as I said, I'm new to web apps), so thanks for the clarification :) – Emile Dec 2 '10 at 10:46.

Never base the functionality of your website on javascript. If you do, you will lose all visitors with javascript off. If you really want to, you need to either detect users with javascript off, and redirect them; or provide alternative.

Furthermore although crawlers can now a days parse javascript, it is still massive damage to SEO of the website. There is also compatibility and overheads issues, which can be issue with today mobile devices, netbooks etc.

1 I really don't think losing all the visitors with javascript turned off is that big of a deal anymore, particularly if your factor your target demographic into the decision. Websites are becoming more dynamic and javascript heavy, so if you have it turned off, you are depriving yourself of lots of web experiences. – micmcg Nov 22 '10 at 3:16 As I said to Brad, I am basing the functionality of my web app on javascript anyway, I'm mostly wondering about a clean way to do that (clean as in understandable, modifyable, reusable code, I don't mind much if it doesn't work on mobile platforms).

– Emile Nov 30 '10 at 16:58.

I got into the same trouble some time back. I have a webpage that renders something using web. Py templates and it had ajax pagination.So it had to render the next page using javascript.

I ended up extending web. Py templating engine to generate a javascript function to render the same template output. See this blog post for more details: anandology.com/blog/javascript-templatin....

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