jquery - JSON vs HTML Ajax response

Question

Which is faster, to return ajax in JSON and then process JSON response to render the html, or just have the Ajax response the raw html in a bunch of <li></li>'s?

Answer 1

Depends. In both cases, the server is simply returning a response with text. If the JSON version of the response requires more characters than the HTML version, that response will take longer to be transmitted back to the client, and vice versa.

But of course there is also the server-side script which must do its work. Perhaps in your case generating JSON is faster than HTML from your server-side script. No way for me to know.

And then there is the client-side processing. You'd have to parse the response to turn it into a true object, and then you'd need to iterate over the resulting object in order to generate the HTML. This will definitely take longer than just taking an HTML response and injecting it into the DOM.

However, I doubt that the performance difference will be noticeable, meaning that your decision about providing a JSON response vs. HTML response should be based on other factors.