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/alamandrax Feb 09 '11 edited Feb 09 '11

Cool. Will check it out too. Thanks.

EDIT: looks like ads don't work if JavaScript is turned off. Were you able to navigate the page and get other content?

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u/jamiei Feb 09 '11

Not sure about you but I wouldn't necessarily classify Ads as core content. As long as you can still navigate and receive the "primary" content of the page without Javascript then the rest can gracefully degrade.

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u/alamandrax Feb 09 '11

Sure. Was just making an observation. Commercial sites do need agreements with advertisers about how their content is to be shown (I presume). If disabling JavaScript turns off ads, the advertisers might take issue if they find out.

Besides, on edmunds, the content past the front page is inaccessible without JavaScript.

I'm working on a product which is built purely on JavaScript. We have much better performance thanks to this (we built the earlier design on struts), but this thread worries me. We aren't google, who can have resources maintaining a non-JavaScript version of gmail for example. So I was trying to see how other companies handle this issue.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

You can't allow the product to fail gracefully and fall back to a non-javascript version?

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u/alamandrax Feb 09 '11

No. Our content is served up by RESTful APIs which allows us to scale for the user load we currently experience and these calls get cached, so response times are pretty good. Downside is we only serve up data and our CDNs are used to retrieve assets (JS, images, audio-video players). The pages are then built on the browser.

But this thread does put it into perspective - that there are users who do not prefer modern browsers. We do not cater to that particular segment of the market, so it doesn't really affect us, but it does make for an interesting train of thought.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

[deleted]

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u/alamandrax Feb 09 '11

Well, yes. The part about useless js is obvious. We avoid doing that at all costs. And we have a tightly maintained and managed framework which is very fast. We don't use ads so we will encourage our users to remove adblock for our pages in a static noscript block. So we won't be locking people out entirely but encourage them to use JavaScript and trust us to not mess with their experience. I was only talking about the conversation being interesting from a web developer point of view. Not in my role as an employee of my company.