For each new page on your site that your user loads, the benefit of single page apps becomes greater: Now she only has to load a bit of JSON, not a full page. So essentially single page apps are a tiny bit slower on the first page load, but much quicker on subsequent page loads.
rcsorensen|11 years ago
Give the full html of the first page, load the JS necessary. You get the best of both worlds.
On the first request, the client receives a rendered html page, gets to read the page, then JS functionality is attached.
On any subsequent pages, you do a simple JSON request and update the DOM.
The approaches come together without sacrificing anything. You get to write a single code base using JS (with a node.js backend doing string manipulation so it doesn't even need a DOM), the user gets a page without having to wait for external resource loads, and all page transitions past that are a simple data-fetch away.