Component to display an HTML fragment vs. DCR. Which is better?

Hi folks,

I'm looking for an opinion...hopefully one based on experience. In a nutshell, we're trying to decide the best way to display the contents of a DCR in a component. Typically this would be a slam dunk using the out of the box DCR datum functionality. However, it was hypothesized that performance would be better if we displayed an HTML fragment instead of consuming a DCR.

That said, here are the two approaches:

Generate & publish an HTML fragment (generated from a DCR). The component displays the fragment via AJAX (There's an out of the box component that does this called "Embed HTML with AJAX").
Rely on a DCR datum and consume the DCR's contents via XSLT.

As stated earlier, the main reason we are considering #1 is for performance considerations.

Are there any compelling reasons NOT to go with approach #1?

Thanks in advance,

-Dan

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Comments

nipper

DCR Datum will be executed server side and should be a lot faster than AJAX. I would use the DCR datum, it is loaded server side and the complete rendered page is pushed to the client.

With AJAX it will pass everything down to the client, which then queries for the DCR adn completes the load. It is possible that the AJAX will start loading faster (due to a smaller footprint) than the natice DCR, but the completion of a AJAX call will but much greater than everything else.

Rick Poulin

The additional downfall is that any content populated via AJAX will not be indexable by search engines (since they don't execute javascript), and you create a potential accessibility issue for screen readers and such.

I would suggest you qualify whether there's actually a performance issue with the DCR datum approach before trying to find solutions to a problem that may not exist.

Wyrm

Thanks fellas. Good feedback.