SPA Routing w/ Progressive Enhancement

spaRoutingProgEnhacement.txt

A structural issue I've been thinking about a lot lately is routing in single page apps. 
S.P.A.'s are great. They can increase speed (== UX++) and reduce the load on your server.
However, routing can be tricky and they can become a barrier to progressive enhancement.


1. How to set up your server side routing
   Server can accept either hash uri's (/#/foo/bar) or hashless uri's (/foo/bar)
   These should have the same result with the exception of the client not reloading the page when the hash is present

2. On an initial page load, serve pre-rendered html on the initial request.
   The key here should be that all links are hashless - meaning, they will trigger a page reload.
   If a user clicks a link, they will request another rendered page from the server.

3. If JS is enabled, after loading change all links to hash hrefs.


This effectively changes from a server rendered page to a client-rendered SPA when JS is enabled.

Possible improvements:
Cache the client IP server side and reroute requests to a seperate node responsible for rendering
Could also combine with knowledge not to send JS packets after first request to reduce load and latency.