Posted by Shane Becker on
What’s the problem?
The main problem is that LifeHacker URLs now don’t map to actual content. Well, every URL references the LifeHacker homepage. If you are lucky enough to have the JavaScript running successfully, the homepage then triggers off several Ajax requests to render the page, hopefully with the desired content showing up at some point.
Far more complicated than a simple URL, far more error prone, and far brittler.
Ben Ward pulls no punches about the “#!”.
Let’s get something very clear: Hash-bang URLs are shit. They’re ugly, brittle and a furious hack in the absence of anything else.
Tim Bray (who you might remember as one of the inventors of XML and Atom) doesn’t like the proliferation of hashbangs (#!), either.
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.
The truth is that if site content doesn’t load through curl it’s broken.
Please use real URLs. That hashbang nonsense is not good for any of us.