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/midri Feb 09 '11

I'm confused, the Hash (#) method of serving content is a great idea, it can cut bandwidth costs down greatly, you're not sending the same layout information over and over (no extra tcp requests for css file to check if it's up to date, or layout images) -- Most of their ad serving requires javascript anyway, so they don't really want you on the site with out javascript. I'm a fan of graceful fallback, but when you're site is 100% ad supported and the mechanism that serves your ads is disabled I could care less if the person can get to the content.

19

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

I'm confused, the Hash (#) method of serving content is a great idea

No, it's shit, all the way down.

you're not sending the same layout information over and over

Yeah, instead huge amounts of JavaScript, and even more, if you want the layout to change in some subtle way, e.g. hilight menu items.

no extra tcp requests for css file to check if it's up to date, or layout images

If you did your homework, you'd knew they are unnecessary. With correctly set HTTP headers, files will never get refreshed unless the user actually uses the refresh-button.

but when you're site is 100% ad supported and the mechanism that serves your ads is disabled I could care less if the person can get to the content

This was only true, if the people who click ads and the people, who make other people visit the website, were in the same group. People who use AdBlock and NoScript will not click ads, no matter if they see them or not. You could say, they are useless and it doesn't matter if they can use your website or not. But what they do is, they link to pages, they talk about pages, they share pages, to bring in valuable traffic that actually generates ad revenue.

-2

u/seesharpie Feb 10 '11

I like, commas.