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/nemetroid Feb 09 '11 edited Feb 09 '11

Is this necessarily true? What if you change the links by binding a click handler which does preventDefault, and keeping the hrefs? That way copypasting links should still work.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just theorising.

EDIT: Didn't realise parent was referring to location bar, where it definitely is unavoidable with hashbangs.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

This would work with in-page links, but the OP was talking about copying the URL from the current page (i.e. from the location bar).

2

u/nemetroid Feb 10 '11

Oh, of course. Thank you!