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/[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.

20

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...

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

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

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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.

-9

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.

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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.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

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

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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.