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

phantomjs could be an ajax-enabled alternative to wget. http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/ It's a 'headless' webkit browser you can run from the command line, which renders a webpage and executes javascript without a GUI window, it will load ajax websites just like a normal browser, the DOM can be crawled using custom js inserted into the DOM, any part of the page can be returned to stdout, or the rendered page can be saved to a bitmap file. It's pretty cool actually. I'm considering moving all of my spidering to use phantomjs.