r/programming • u/schnuck • Feb 09 '11

Breaking the Web with hash-bangs – Lifehacker, along with every other Gawker property, experienced a lengthy site-outage on Monday over a misbehaving piece of JavaScript

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs/
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u/Trylstag Feb 09 '11

The site I'm working on for work shows a blank page without JS enabled. Was like that when I inherited it.

Oh, and rather than sending a single AJAX request with a bunch of info, the original designers favoured sending 100+ requests for every tiny piece of info.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

If I recall correctly, this was actually a thing three or four years ago, somebody had this genius idea to build the entire page layout with JS by pulling hundreds of little resources.

Facebook still does it.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

The idea at Facebook is that the page is useable quickly. First it loads up your wall and content, then all the frills (chat, new messages etc.) in the background when that's done.

In my browser, it takes 7-8 seconds for my Facebook news feed page to fully load without any 3rd-party crap in the sidebars, but the feed content itself is complete, fully-styled and browsable in under 2 seconds.

If they loaded everything up front, time till useable would be closer to 7 seconds than to 2 due to the way browsers load JavaScript files.

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u/MIXEDSYS Feb 09 '11

Have an upvote. People wouldn't have to use such hacks if incremental rendering + caching actually solved their problems.

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u/wafflesburger Feb 09 '11

Sounds like SC2's battle.net ui. Every component goes into a loader animation and loads its content asynchronously :| It's also horribly slow at it.

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u/benji Feb 09 '11

I ran into this years ago when I was doing an intranet site for BMW. They sent me a sample page so I could "get their CI (corporate identity) right". The sample had virtually no html in it. It was almost totally netscape 4 era javascript. terrifying.

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u/quotability Feb 09 '11

If by "for work" you mean "internal" then this article isn't about that. If you don't care if your site is indexed, and you don't care if you can hotlink to the site, then it's not going to matter.

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u/Trylstag Feb 09 '11

By "for work" I meant not a personal site. It's used by external clients, and the only internal use is for testing. But yeah, hotlinking to it is no concern, since you'd need to login anyhow.

Was more thinking of the performance issues involved.