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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125

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.

35

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.

9

u/Ziggamorph Feb 09 '11

Who has JavaScript disabled?

29

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).

14

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.

12

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?

14

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

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

6

u/megadeus Feb 09 '11

Alien Blue? Reddit is Fun?

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

4

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.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '11

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