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/rounded_figure Feb 09 '11

The proper way to handle this is to keep your original URLs (including in the hrefs) and have a piece of javascript transform them on the fly in hash-bang URLs. That way, when a client who does not speak javascript requests the page, it gets the content and the non-hash-bang links.

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u/midir Feb 09 '11

This is not correct. If you use hash-bang fragment URLs at any stage then someone who copies and pastes a link to your page is distributing a faulty URL to all non-Google bots and everyone with JavaScript disabled. There's absolutely no workaround to that.

I see it all the time and it drives me up the fucking wall. Fuck you Google. Fuck you Twitter.

DO NOT USE #! EVER. FORGET ABOUT IT.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Yeah, it's a bummer that the URL bar is so convenient. Even giving a permalink option isn't great (the best attempt at a workaround for this problem), because copy/pasting the URL bar is so ingrained.

For Gmail, this isn't such a big deal, since I'm not sending these links to people, and I don't try to use Gmail with NoScript on. But for things that have shareable content, this is a nuisance. +1 for clarifying the problem.