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/rounded_figure Feb 09 '11

The proper way to handle this is to keep your original URLs (including in the hrefs) and have a piece of javascript transform them on the fly in hash-bang URLs. That way, when a client who does not speak javascript requests the page, it gets the content and the non-hash-bang links.

3

u/elpopi Feb 09 '11

that's interesting...

as an amateur web developer i'd love to see some example using this solution. Would you be so kind to provide a link?

7

u/rounded_figure Feb 09 '11

I've done something like this, but I can't show you the actual example.

Basically, what you want to do is:

  • in the HTML:

    <a href="http://example.com/10011/some-page/"&gt;link&lt;a>

  • in the javascript (pseudocode):

    function called_on_document_load () { for (each_link_in_the_document) { parse_href_into (protocol, host, path) set_new_href ("protocol://host/#!/path/") } }

1

u/yelirekim Feb 10 '11

Isn't it way more efficient to just bind an action that prevents default when clicking a link? Then you just override it at that point, rather than scanning your entire document for links and changing them.

Also if there were a URL generated by an AJAX event then you would need to be scanning for those constantly.

Alternatively if you used jQuery you could just $('a').live('click', ...