Ask HN: What is the purpose of Airbnb's meta content JSON?

3 pointsby cstrasenhace 11 años2 comments

A colleague of mine noticed the way they provide key-value pairs (most likely also for their https://github.com/airbnb/polyglot.js) but oddly doing so via "<meta content=". There is also application settings in there. I wonder what the reason might be. JS variables is what I would have expected.

some examples:

  https://gist.github.com/christophstrasen/9c13e1a94c0aff25844e (settings)
  https://gist.github.com/christophstrasen/f7ae6424089001aecdc8 (locale)
  https://gist.github.com/christophstrasen/847d13719bf557a6b823 (translation)

Ideas:

  - More comfortable to access via the DOM?
  - SEO (but why config settings?)
  - Caching

1 comments

gpmcadamhace 11 años

The alternative would be to generate JSON as a JavaScript file or in a SCRIPT tag, so my guess would be so that it can be rendered as part of the view without generating code.

Another reason would be that they keep the same HEAD but swap out the BODY for things like a/b testing, caching, page loading, etc.

Either way, after you determine that you don't want to store JSON as part of your BODY, the HEAD is the only other place you can store it, and if you don't want to generate code, then META tags probably make the most semantic sense.

cstrasenhace 11 años

Here is what I got back from wonderlib (their services seem a bit hammered right now) https://wonderlib.com/research-network/response/557a3aa79718...