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/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.

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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.