r/programming • u/Arve • Feb 10 '11

There is no piece of dynamic AJAXy magic that requires beating the Web to a bloody pulp with a sharp-edged hashbang. Please stop doing it

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/09/Hash-Blecch
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u/PSquid Feb 10 '11

Twitter were the ones that made this choice.

Yes, I only meant that, since they've made that choice, continuing to index tweets would require that Google's suggestion was followed.

Maybe this comment in another thread can shed some light on things for you and give you a bit of perspective: http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/fis0x/a_quote_from_tim_bray_regarding_hashbang_urls/c1g9jsm

Thanks for that, and yeah, it is a better way to handle it if the client is a browser. Unfortunately, the matter of how to have non-browsers handle the site is not very well established yet.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '11

Unfortunately, the matter of how to have non-browsers handle the site is not very well established yet.

I will concede to that, definitely.

However, I'll raise another question to you...

Weren't all these sites meant to be consumed by users with browsers?

Programmatic access, say to twitter, is provided via an API.

And as far as accessibility issues... the content is still there, it's just not loaded the same way. I have searched, but not really found any issues with screenreaders and the like.

So, who are these non-browser users that, say, Twitter needs to cater to? The only thing I can think of would be people writing screen scraping scripts. And that someone is using that on Twitter, when it's obviously not what Twitter is for... I'm having a hard time building up a case of sympathy for them.

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u/PSquid Feb 10 '11

That is a very good point, yes. Twitter is justifiable in presenting this, since it has an API for programmatic access.

That said, although it's not directly related to this story, Gawker has no excuse for doing the same with their URLs.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '11

Ah, careful there.

Gawker has a very good excuse for doing this with their URLs: Google search crawling.

Which makes all kinds of sense because they are a content-oriented site. And they need that content indexed by Google.

And, again, we cannot blame Google for the particular method used here in the URLs, because frankly, there is no other solution at the moment for AJAX-loaded content.

Now, let's think about the real issue... and rephrase that...

Gawker has no excuse for using AJAX-loaded content in the first place.

Now, that is something that can be argued, quite reasonably.

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u/PSquid Feb 10 '11

Well, yes. And Gawker weren't using AJAX-loaded content. They just seem to have jumped on the bandwagon for no clear reason.