Submission + - Client-side JavaScript to Replace Server-side HTML (zx2c4.com) 4
zx2c4 writes: "I've recently finished writing a simple photo gallery web application that scans a directory tree of photographs and generates static JSON files and thumbnails. There is then an accompanying web page that consists of a single index.html with some heavy JavaScript that fetches the JSON files and writes the layout of the page. You can navigate various pages and switch between different views, all without loading a different HTML page, but because the information is downloaded from the JSON files via AJAX. The app uses hash URLs to mimic navigating through a normal web page. It's all very similar to how GMail works, really. So, we've all seen AJAX used in a low key way at a zillion places around the Internet. But what I'm wondering is — do you suppose that the future of web applications will be in doing all of the page structure in client-side JavaScript, and that servers will only serve up the static index.html/scripts.js/styles.css and then a bunch of (dynamic or static) JSON files? Are the days of having a server dynamically write the actual HTML over? Do you expect to see nothing but JavaScript apps doing all the display for JSON data? Do websites still have a responsibility to display with out JavaScript as a requirement, or have we all got to accept that JavaScript is here to stay, and will be in the future responsible for most HTML writing?"
