Configuring any CDN to deliver only one file no matter what url has been requested

Question

I am currently working on a new project where the entire page should be implemented in HTML5/JS working against an API/JSON. Since the entire application should only consist of

Answer 1

If you’re considering SEO and friendly URLs, you can accomplish some of that using pushState, sure. Just remember that:

• When redirecting all routes to index.html you will also serve the exact same html content to the search engines no matter what URL they march in on. Then it wont matter how "SEO-friendly" your URL is.

• If you’re thinking IE support, it doesn’t support the History API, so you’ll need a higher-level history framework or some other workaround for IE. And that will most likely include #-based URLs. So you will basically have two different URLs for each view, that’s something to consider when people share URLs or figuring out how search robots catches links to your site.

I would suggest considering the following two options before you go too far in finding a suitable cloud host:

1. Off-load some of the data logic to the backend and serve at least some digestable content for each view. You can still remove or maybe parse that content in your app and do your pushstate/jsonAPI thing for better UX, but you will have "true", scannable URLs for the search engines, opera mini users and some other unfortunate browsers. These static pages do not have to serve the same functionality or even styles, just think of it as the last fallback.

2. Forget about the CDN for the app, just use the CDN for static files, images, scripts etc. You can have a couple of fallbacks for the app itself, but it’s the media that really pulls the server. Doing so will put you in control over the app and the server behind it, but you can still use CDN for what it was meant for – serving static content.