Why Are Publishing Pages Not MdsCompliant?

Question

In SP 2013 the publishing architecture is not compatible with the Minimal Download Strategy. As far as I can tell this is because the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll assembly is not signed with the [MdsCompliant(true)] attribute and the PublishingPage class does not inherit from the DeltaPage class like the WebPartPage and the UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase classes do.

Why is this?

Is it because publishing pages are scheduled (hence inheriting from ScheduledItem)?

Is there some other technical reason why the page type is incompatible?

Or is Microsoft just trying to push people away from using the publishing architecture?

Edit:

Stumbled upon this article by Wictor Wilen again a few months after asking this question, and it looks like he's updated the post:

[Added 2012-08-16] The MdsCompliant attribute is set on the whole Microsoft.SharePoint.dll assembly, but not on the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll assembly. This is a bummer. This means that all the Field Controls, used in page layouts, are not MDS compliant – which means no MDS on publishing sites.

So I was right about the assembly attribute being missing from Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll. Still wondering why MSFT went this route for publishing.

Answer 1

I think the most authoritative answer about why publishing pages are not MdsCompliant is the article by Wictor you already have linked to yourselves.

My guess is that MS just hasn't tested all the Publishing controls for being MDS compliant.

And you can also argue that Publishing pages should work even if visitors has JavaScript turned off (which shouldn't happen these days, but ...), but they should have left that decision with the site collection admin.

Finally the publishing pages was mainly create for public publishing (even though a lot of the real use is internal) and already got a bad rep for poor SEO. With the new Managed navigation in SP2013 MS tries to address that, so the thought could also have been that supporting the very SEO hostile MDS might negate that work.

Answer 2

A very interesting question which (unless you're a MS employee in the SharePoint development team) is almost impossible to answer. The only authoritative answer I found is a blog post by Jay from October 22, 2013 SP2013 New Feature - Minimal Download Feature where he simply states:

This feature is not available with publishing sites.

He also links to Wictor Wilén's blog post as well as Introduction to Minimal Download Strategy in SharePoint 2013 by Bill Bear from November 2012. None of these articles discuss why it's not enabled on Publishing Sites.

Stefan Goßner also links to Wictor Wilén's blog, and in the comments, a similar question as yours is raised by Cornelius J. van Dyk:

Considering the fact that Publishing does not support MDS, would you it be prudent to veer away from Publishing sites altogether then? I suppose my question is this. Given the major performance boost that MDS could yield on Team sites, would there be any outweighing reason to stay with Publishing sites?

Unfortunately without reply.

My best answer is that there is no answer. I assume that this have yet to be decided by Microsoft team. Probably they will do some real world testing first i.e. looking into the support issues they get on MDSFeature, before moving on to Publishing Sites.

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