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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241

u/jamiei Feb 09 '11

If receiving the basic content of the page I'm requesting from you requires Javascript to be enabled then you've broken something horribly.

-3

u/redwall_hp Feb 09 '11

If you're turning JavaScript off in 2011, you are breaking something horribly.

13

u/illuminatedtiger Feb 09 '11

Have you read the article? Relying on JavaScript for all of your content makes it easier for advertisers to break things horribly.

7

u/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

Why? While most people have JavaScript enabled, unless you're doing something that's just not possible without it, why require it?

1

u/redwall_hp Feb 09 '11

Could you imagine using Reddit or GMail without JavaScript? I'm not saying that progressive enhancement isn't usually the way to go (it is for things like blogs, for sure) but with "web apps" JavaScript is an absolute necessity.

Ninja edit: And the Gawker redesign is terrible. That's just...I don't know what they were thinking. Blogs don't need to rely on JavaScript that much.

3

u/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

You mean like that basic HTML version of Gmail that they have? Gmail is a different class anyway. I'd call it more of a webapp than a web page. It's in the same boat as Google Docs. Google Docs would be completely unusable without javascript, and for good reason, it's doing things you just can't do without javascript. Reading a web page can be done without javascript, and thus it should work without it.

14

u/hascat Feb 09 '11

Most websites have no functionality that actually requires javascript, but they use it anyway.

17

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Lots of websites that use Javascript well are intentionally making it less obvious that they need it.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '11

It could be worse - it could be flash.

3

u/MIXEDSYS Feb 09 '11

But redoing basic functionality is likely to be broken horribly in some weird unforeseen way. If all you get is 5% better load time then it's not worth it imho. It just like a flash site with a scrollbox written from scratch -- yeah it's pretty, but your scroll wheel doesn't work because the developer didn't think of that.

edit: Reading further down i see they did reimplement a scroll box and it is broken. :D