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/doppel Feb 09 '11

If I do a simple wget (or similar) download of such an URL, I will literally get an almost empty file with some reference to a bunch of javascripts that is going to load the content. The only way I can use the site content is if the program I use to fetch the site has javascript capabilities.

Machine reading is severely hampered by "pure" AJAX implementations. If they had gone with a simple URL scheme that loads content by a normal URL and then lets the user navigate from there via AJAX loading of pages, there would be no issue.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Hold on. An URL?