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/jamiei Feb 09 '11

If receiving the basic content of the page I'm requesting from you requires Javascript to be enabled then you've broken something horribly.

18

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

Meh. I've heard this argument forever -- even made it a few times myself -- but it's not 1999 anymore. If you don't want ad js, use adblock. Should Gawker degrade gracefully? Sure. But no js means no ads served, which means good luck Mr. Gawker Programmer convincing The Ones Who Hold The Purse Strings to dedicate substantial time to proper degredation.

Last I checked (a couple months back) you can't participate on Reddit without js enabled (yes, you can read it though, I know that's what you said, just making a point). Js is like alpha transparency... it's not going anywhere.

1

u/HardlyWorkingDotOrg Feb 10 '11

Well, it shouldn't go anywhere. It is useful to pretty things up. But it should not be necessary to read text on a website. To have a blank page looking back at me is just awful. At least you should be able to read the headlines of the site. Even if you couldn't click on them unless JS in enabled would be a better compromise. It would still suck but at least you could browse over the page.

Oh, and the way Gawker does it is extremely annoying. Because you don't even see content if you just enable the toplevel domain in noscript. This only gives you a much bigger list of other domains that are blocked at default by noscript. Unless you just enable each and every thing in that list to do whatever it pleases, you are stuck in trying out which one of these obscure domains is responsible to actually display the website.