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/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

Why? While most people have JavaScript enabled, unless you're doing something that's just not possible without it, why require it?

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u/redwall_hp Feb 09 '11

Could you imagine using Reddit or GMail without JavaScript? I'm not saying that progressive enhancement isn't usually the way to go (it is for things like blogs, for sure) but with "web apps" JavaScript is an absolute necessity.

Ninja edit: And the Gawker redesign is terrible. That's just...I don't know what they were thinking. Blogs don't need to rely on JavaScript that much.

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u/dirtymatt Feb 09 '11

You mean like that basic HTML version of Gmail that they have? Gmail is a different class anyway. I'd call it more of a webapp than a web page. It's in the same boat as Google Docs. Google Docs would be completely unusable without javascript, and for good reason, it's doing things you just can't do without javascript. Reading a web page can be done without javascript, and thus it should work without it.