Building SPA application. Is calling RenderBody necessary?

Question

I'm building SPA application using Backbone.js and as its back-end I want to use ASP.NET Web API. I need only one page and this fact brings me a lot of confusion. ApiController returns json response and as far as I understand there's no need in asp.net-specific views at all. Am I right?

Can I use plain html for my main page? Or should I use *.cshtml and put a call to RenderBody instead?

If choose the first option then how will I handle validation?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Well the trick is that if you want search engines to be able to index your page, or people to be able to share to Facebook with a custom icon/description, etc you'll need to serve back static HTML -- none of those bots are able to run your javascript to render the page as the browser does.

If you're uninterested in this, then yes, you can completely avoid RenderBody.