One of the largest perceived drawbacks to creating a SPA or other Rich Internet Application is that they’re not SEO friendly or very accessible. With the advent of technologies such as ARIA, HTML5 and Node.js, things are changing. Web apps are becoming more usable and accessible, though also making them crawlable and highly performant is a formidable challenge.

I recently heard a talk from Peter-Paul Koch of QuirksMode on the touch events in mobile at the orbitz.com office in Chicago. During his presentation PPK gave us a great sound bite to use when dealing with the 300ms delay many touch devices use for capturing double-tap (zoom) events:

Stick with click.

Peter-Paul Koch

Under stick with click devs are discouraged from hijacking ontouchstart to make click events occur without noticeable delay. And though a good rule of thumb I view it as more of a best practice than a hard-and-fast rule.

Here’s why…