title: Is client-side UI rendering via Javascript a good idea?
body: <p>The "classic" approach to web development has been for some time a thin client and a thick server: the server generates HTML and spits it out for the browser to render only. But with current browsers (and also due to the availability of good libraries and frameworks) Javascript now works. Web devs can now pretty much assume that their Javascript code will work and stop bothering.</p>
  
  <p>This certainly opened new possibilities for web development. Apps could now be composed mostly of HTML content returned from the server and rendered by the browser with some UI manipulation being done client-side. The client could even query the server for fresh data for updating parts of the UI. But can we go down all the other way? An app can certainly be designed as a server that spits only the most minimalist JSON glued together to a thick Javascript client responsible for building and controlling the whole user interface. Yeah, this approach can seriously break URLs to the extent that people can no longer send pointers around, but it is certainly possible to design your way around that (and for some apps, like e-mail and feed readers, this doesn't even matter).</p>
  
  <p>What do you think? Have you ever tried that approach? Do things get too slow? Are modern browsers capable of dealing with that amount of Javascript code? Are there any significant differences between browsers implementations that still bite the unadvised developer even with the latest libraries? What kinds of applications do you think this approach is suitable for? Is it actually suitable for <em>anything</em>?</p>