… also – Brian Hogan makes some really good points in his “Web Design For Developers” book about how accessibility isn’t just for people with various degrees of disabilities anymore. it also cover things like mobile browsers, text browsers, etc. 

there’s a lot to consider when building an app that uses a framework like this, and audience / device / accessibility is an important factor

I’ve never seen a heavy client app that degraded gracefully. Could just be that I haven’t looked under the covers of enough heavy client sites.
Guess you could always go the non RIA path. Building a web application twice would seem prohibitively expensive for all but giants like Google or Facebook.

If anyone has got some solid info on following WAI-ARIA, I’d love to hear it.

personally, i think backbone does a great job with views and viewmodels when approached as an MVVM perspective. however, i still haven’t looked at Knockout. once i get around to doing that, i might change my opinion :)

1.) Our application is essentially a specialized report runner, number cruncher and modeler for hospitals throughout the US.  We were tasked with re-writing the criteria for running these reports.  It was a long page full of html form elements, so we decided that dynamically adding criteria on demand would be nice. 

So we wrote a large js file to describe the html, business rules, client-side validation that each criteria would use.  Then we had a formbuilder which was the driver for the criteria getting painted on the “canvas” (what we called the area where the criteria was placed in the DOM, not to be mistaken with html5 canvas).  We also had a formbuilder.events file which would listen to certain events (deletion, addition, validation etc) of the criterias placed on the page.  And we had other things.

The result: we started with a team of about 6 and now we’re 14 what we saw was that controlling the js produced by the team was easy at first. 

But as time moved on people would place templates all over the place, events were scattered, etc. etc.   The app had clean code everywhere except in the js.

SO THE WHY:

- So what bbjs gave us was a well documented unified way of doing most things.
- It gave us great documentation, so getting new team members to understand “how” to do things was much easier.