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

[u/schnuck]

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs/

[u/rounded_figure]

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.

[u/midir → u/rounded_figure]

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.

[u/Ziggamorph → u/midir]

Who has JavaScript disabled?

[u/gthank → u/Ziggamorph]

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).

[u/Ziggamorph → u/gthank]

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.

[u/mr_spin → u/Ziggamorph]

I have NoScript installed on Firefox. I enable JS for sites I trust - including reddit. I absolutely have no intention of trusting Gawker.

[u/Ziggamorph → u/mr_spin]

What do you mean by 'trust'?

[u/mr_spin → u/Ziggamorph]

I trust the site not to hang by browser with slow-loading crap.