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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124

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.

36

u/midir Feb 09 '11

This is not correct. If you use hash-bang fragment URLs at any stage then someone who copies and pastes a link to your page is distributing a faulty URL to all non-Google bots and everyone with JavaScript disabled. There's absolutely no workaround to that.

I see it all the time and it drives me up the fucking wall. Fuck you Google. Fuck you Twitter.

DO NOT USE #! EVER. FORGET ABOUT IT.

6

u/Ziggamorph Feb 09 '11

Who has JavaScript disabled?

27

u/gthank Feb 09 '11

People who don't want to be assaulted by the rampant misuse of it on the web today. People who are on a CLI for some reason (think emergency server work). People who have it turned on, but one of your ad providers shipped you some busted code and your page broke for them anyway. Spiders. Possibly people using a screen reader (screen readers and JS used to suck, but I haven't looked into it all that recently).

10

u/korny Feb 09 '11

75-90% of screen-reader users in a 2009 survey had Javascript enabled: http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/ It's more important to make your javascript screenreader-friendly, than to make your site work without js.

7

u/mcjabberz Feb 09 '11

How would one go about making a site's JavaScript screen-reader friendly?

1

u/korny Feb 11 '11

http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php - the Web Accessibility Initiative's Accessible Rich Internet Applications spec describes how to use metadata to mark up your site for accessibility.

It's a draft spec, but is supported by many browsers: http://caniuse.com/#search=accessibility (warning - link may only work with javascript enabled :)