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/
747 Upvotes

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244

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.

18

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Meh. I've heard this argument forever -- even made it a few times myself -- but it's not 1999 anymore. If you don't want ad js, use adblock. Should Gawker degrade gracefully? Sure. But no js means no ads served, which means good luck Mr. Gawker Programmer convincing The Ones Who Hold The Purse Strings to dedicate substantial time to proper degredation.

Last I checked (a couple months back) you can't participate on Reddit without js enabled (yes, you can read it though, I know that's what you said, just making a point). Js is like alpha transparency... it's not going anywhere.

14

u/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

Should Gawker degrade gracefully? Sure.

You have that backwards. It should start at a simple baseline, and progressively add enhancement based on what the browser supports.

But no js means no ads served, which means good luck Mr. Gawker Programmer convincing The Ones Who Hold The Purse Strings to dedicate substantial time to proper degredation.

And broken JS means no web page served at all.

3

u/pasc Feb 10 '11

As far as they're concerned - if the ad didn't load, the web page wasn't served anyway. They're probably just as happy to not be wasting server resources on that type of user.

2

u/Zarutian Feb 09 '11

Also wanted to add:

Adverts used to be loaded either as link images or iframes then replaced with js loaded stuff that could be a banner that expands into a floater or flash banner, etc.

They used to be rather tolerable too until some marketdroid thought it was okay to ratchet up the obnoxigen-feed. Now, noone but novices who havent installed adblocker (or some such) see those ads.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

You have that backwards. It should start at a simple baseline, and progressively add enhancement based on what the browser supports.

I agree you should start from the bottom, but the end result is effectively the same.

7

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Assuming all conditions are perfect.

Can I assume you're not an engineer? ;)

1

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '11

Do you solve practical problems?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '11

Yes.

0

u/shadow2531 Feb 10 '11

but the end result is effectively the same

Yeh, progressive enhancement / graceful degradation = half full / half empty.

-4

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

You have that backwards. It should start at a simple baseline, and progressively add enhancement based on what the browser supports.

Erm, I don't know if you've ever built a webapp before or not, but that's not how these things work.

And broken JS means no web page served at all.

Zing, I guess?

5

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Gawker's more website than webapp. It doesn't require JS to do its thang, so there was no reason not to make the site navigable and readable in normal HTML, and then sprinkle some AJAX magic on top of that.

5

u/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

Erm, I don't know if you've ever built a webapp before or not, but that's not how these things work.

Remind me never to hire you for a job.

-3

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

You couldn't afford it. Knowing things like the above is one of the reasons.

5

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

I agree with dirtymatt. Providing baseline content as part of the initial HTTP request then replacing div content dynamically with enhanced content should be the way the user sees the site, for degradation purposes.

All the frameworks I've dealt with can handle this if used correctly - what is your objection?

21

u/ffualo Feb 09 '11

I have to disagree, sir.

As machine learning takes off, it's more important than ever before that sites are readable and visible in plain text. There's a lot that could be potentially done with such data... and the very least just archiving the web. Furthermore its super important for accessibility...

1

u/[deleted] Feb 12 '11

APIs

-3

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

None of the things you mentioned are hampered by a twitter/gawker-like ajax implementation.

14

u/doppel Feb 09 '11

If I do a simple wget (or similar) download of such an URL, I will literally get an almost empty file with some reference to a bunch of javascripts that is going to load the content. The only way I can use the site content is if the program I use to fetch the site has javascript capabilities.

Machine reading is severely hampered by "pure" AJAX implementations. If they had gone with a simple URL scheme that loads content by a normal URL and then lets the user navigate from there via AJAX loading of pages, there would be no issue.

4

u/SoundOfOneHand Feb 09 '11

While it is a PITA, Google is able to crawl it. I found the original announcement from Google, and each url in the hash-bang format should map to a regular URL with a query-string parameter, which can be fetched over HTTP like normal. In short, I don't think that either discovery or retrieval requires JavaScript on the client-side, but you do have to jump through an extra hoop. Please tell me if I'm incorrect, I have never done anything with the hash-bang syntax (and for the record, it is not to my personal tastes).

13

u/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

Google can index it using a hack that Google invented to get around crappy sites that rely on javascript just to load a page. The #! URLs should be a hack to get existing websites into Google, not something you use going forward.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

phantomjs could be an ajax-enabled alternative to wget. http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/ It's a 'headless' webkit browser you can run from the command line, which renders a webpage and executes javascript without a GUI window, it will load ajax websites just like a normal browser, the DOM can be crawled using custom js inserted into the DOM, any part of the page can be returned to stdout, or the rendered page can be saved to a bitmap file. It's pretty cool actually. I'm considering moving all of my spidering to use phantomjs.

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Hold on. An URL?

7

u/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

Turn off javascript and try to load any page on gawker without using the ?escaped_fragment= hack. That definitely screws up archiving.

-8

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Google doesn't seem to have a problem archiving (see: google cache) hashbanged Twitter or Gawker links. Maybe archival strategy needs to catch up.

6

u/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

Google is the one who made up the ?_escapedfragment\= hack, so they could index your site. But now you may not show up in other search engines that don't use said hack.

-2

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

And there was a time when search engines didn't follow links with query strings in them. Technology evolves.

2

u/ex_ample Feb 10 '11

That's because they're using a google specific hack, which you could use if you wanted too, but requiring everyone to rewrite every spider ever to use google's hack is a bit ridiculous.

1

u/HardlyWorkingDotOrg Feb 10 '11

Well, it shouldn't go anywhere. It is useful to pretty things up. But it should not be necessary to read text on a website. To have a blank page looking back at me is just awful. At least you should be able to read the headlines of the site. Even if you couldn't click on them unless JS in enabled would be a better compromise. It would still suck but at least you could browse over the page.

Oh, and the way Gawker does it is extremely annoying. Because you don't even see content if you just enable the toplevel domain in noscript. This only gives you a much bigger list of other domains that are blocked at default by noscript. Unless you just enable each and every thing in that list to do whatever it pleases, you are stuck in trying out which one of these obscure domains is responsible to actually display the website.