Link tags: backbone

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CloseBrace | A Brief, Incomplete History of JavaScript

Another deep dive into web history, this time on JavaScript. The timeline of JS on the web is retroactively broken down into four eras:

  • the early era: ~1996 – 2004,
  • the jQuery era: ~2004 – 2010,
  • the Single Page App era: ~2010 - 2014, and
  • the modern era: ~2014 - present.

Nice to see “vanilla” JavaScript making a resurgence in that last one.

It’s 2017, the JavaScript ecosystem is both thriving and confusing as all hell. No one seems to be quite sure where it’s headed, only that it’s going to continue to grow and change. The web’s not going anywhere, which means JS isn’t going anywhere, and I’m excited to see what future eras bring us.

The Internet Should Be a Public Good | Jacobin

A gripping history lesson of the internet and the ARPANET before it, emphasising the role of government funding.

Silicon Valley often likes to pretend that innovation is the result of entrepreneurs tinkering in garages. But most of the innovation on which Silicon Valley depends comes from government research, for the simple reason that the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t.

It’s precisely the insulation from market forces that enables government to finance the long-term scientific labor that ends up producing many of the most profitable inventions.

Today we have an internet effectively controlled by a small number of private companies.

Instead of trying to escape the bigness of the Internet, we should embrace it — and bring it under democratic control. This means replacing private providers with public alternatives where it’s feasible, and regulating them where it’s not.

There is nothing in the pipes or protocols of the Internet that obliges it to produce immense concentrations of corporate power. This is a political choice, and we can choose differently.

Researching the Performance costs of JavaScript MVC Frameworks

The Filament Group run the numbers on how long it takes browsers to parse the JavaScript of popular MVC frameworks: Backbone, Angular, and Ember. The results—especially on mobile browsers—are not encouraging.

Prerender - AngularJS SEO, BackboneJS SEO, or EmberJS SEO

I despair sometimes.

Here’s a ridiculous Heath-Robinsonesque convoluted way of getting the mighty all-powerful Googlebot to read the web thangs you’ve built using the new shiny client-side frameworks like Angular, Ember, Backbone…

Here’s another idea: output your HTML in HTML.

That solution works for machines and humans. As a bonus, outputting your HTML in HTML avoids turning JavaScript into a single point of failure.