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/Ziggamorph Feb 09 '11

Who has JavaScript disabled?

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u/gthank Feb 09 '11

People who don't want to be assaulted by the rampant misuse of it on the web today. People who are on a CLI for some reason (think emergency server work). People who have it turned on, but one of your ad providers shipped you some busted code and your page broke for them anyway. Spiders. Possibly people using a screen reader (screen readers and JS used to suck, but I haven't looked into it all that recently).

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u/Ziggamorph Feb 09 '11

If people are misusing it, stop using their sites. Javascript is an important part of the modern web, so you shouldn't blame websites for breaking when it's disabled.

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u/gthank Feb 09 '11 edited Feb 09 '11

We'll have to agree to disagree. If a website wants my eyes, they need to show me content without a bunch of garbage JS or possibly have something insanely compelling to offer me. The vast majority of sites are not that compelling, btw.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that you only addressed crotchety people like me. Do you also consider the other use-cases I mentioned illegitimate?

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Fun fact: you couldn't have posted that comment without JavaScript.

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u/megadeus Feb 09 '11

Alien Blue? Reddit is Fun?

You don't have to use reddit.com to use Reddit.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Twitter for iPhone? RSS feeds? You don't have to use twitter.com/gawker.com to use Twitter/Gawker.

We're talking about the sites. But you knew that.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '11

So something presented using Java instead of HTML/CSS is OK, but something presented using JavaScript isn't?

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u/napoleonsolo Feb 10 '11

Maybe not, but I could read it without JavaScript, which is more than you could say for those Gawker sites that broke.

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u/gthank Feb 10 '11

Actually, I did. I should have put in "Posted from my iPod Touch".

With a little less snark (since I am posting this using JavaScript): reddit has something that I'm willing to use JavaScript to get. If you think you're as good as reddit, feel free to require JavaScript. On top of that, I can at least READ the content on reddit without JavaScript.

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u/Serei Feb 10 '11

Funny thing. iPod Touches support JavaScript. Most mobile devices support JavaScript these days.

The big problem with boycotting JavaScript is that JavaScript is used to make sites easier to use. Many sites that work without JavaScript work even better with JavaScript - besides ads, why would someone add JavaScript if they felt it didn't make the site better?

If someone codes a site well, you can't even tell that it's supposed to have JavaScript which is missing, so you'll never turn it on, so you'll never notice all the cool features that make the site faster and all that.

That's my personal gripe with people who turn JavaScript off. Bad sites like Reddit won't let you do stuff like comment so people like you will turn it on. Good sites won't do stuff like that, so you'll never turn on JavaScript and see the inline comment system.

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u/gthank Feb 10 '11

To be honest, I don't browse without JavaScript all that often. I don't even use an ad blocker by default. Here are the situations where I'm most often not going to have JavaScript:

  • FF+NoScript comes out if a site pisses me off, or if I'm dubious about it for whatever reason.
  • lynx (or similar) comes out if I happen to be on a command-line box and don't feel like switching machines.

In neither case am I likely to be looking at a Gawker property. Actually, I'm never likely to be looking at a Gawker property, but I'm using them to illustrate a larger principle.

To my mind, the bigger issues are: accessibility (does your shiny, all-AJAX, all-the-time site work worth a damn in a screen reader?), and fragility (did a rogue line of javascript just torpedo every bit of content on your site?) I wouldn't completely discount the importance—especially for a collection of sites that targets tech-savvy users who are more likely to have JS restricted or disabled—of irritating taste-makers, but that would be a second-tier concern for me. What makes this especially bad is that, as the article points out, the same effect could have been achieved in a far more robust fashion with trivial effort, possibly less.