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Broken Links

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Re: Broken Links

#91

Post by yuhong »

wmf wrote: post #71
zemaj wrote: post #49

Despite all the FUD around hashbangs, the genuine problem I see with them is that they optimise for internal page loads, not the entry into a website. For example with hashbangs, requests to twitter when logged in go like; 1) HTTP GET http://twitter.com/some_account [~500ms for me] 2) 302 redirect -> HTTP GET http://twitter.com/ [~600ms for me] 3) HTML tells browser to download some JS -> HTTP GET bundle.js [~500ms f…

Basically, NewTwitter isn't a Web site, it's an app and you have to "launch" it before you can do anything.

Yea, in this case HTML/HTTP is being abused as wrapper around an app written in JavaScript, which loads and manipulates the content you see in your browser.

Re: Broken Links

#92

Post by aphexairlines »

stanleydrew wrote: post #77
simonw wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which sucks, because I frequently end up "launching" it by clicking a link to a Twitter profile or tweet on another site, so every few minutes I have to wait for the entire thing to load - and I often end up with a dozen tabs containing the Twitter app when all I really wanted was a few hundred bytes of HTML containing a single tweet!

Presumably your browser caches the app so that you don't have to re-download it on subsequent visits.

The browser might only cache the js code, not the work that happens on load or the memory the app consumes.

Re: Broken Links

#93

Post by vannevar »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #81
bruceboughton wrote: post #48

Isn't the underlying problem that web applications are often displaying combinations of content that doesn't have a natural URL? Take New Twitter, for example. If I click on a tweet in my stream, it shows related tweets. If a drill down a few of those, at some point it becomes impossible to represent the address of the current state in a sane manner. I think URLs are particular to the web (desktop apps don't have the…

In that case "web application" is a misnomer. If the current state has no natural URL, it's not a legitimate part of the World-Wide Web. Instead the authors are tunneling a proprietary protocol over AJAX to carry opaque content to a single-purpose GUI app, just like all the terrible client/server apps from the 90s only slower.

If the current state has no natural URL, it's not a legitimate part of the World-Wide Web.

But most of the popular content accessible via the web now fits this description. Look at Google's own homepage, it's a complex Javascript application that's completely opaque. @bruceboughton is right, the problem isn't that people aren't respecting the WWW specification, it's that the specification is no longer adequate to describe what the Web has become.

Re: Broken Links

#94

Post by prodigal_erik »

vannevar wrote: post #93
prodigal_erik wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case "web application" is a misnomer. If the current state has no natural URL, it's not a legitimate part of the World-Wide Web. Instead the authors are tunneling a proprietary protocol over AJAX to carry opaque content to a single-purpose GUI app, just like all the terrible client/server apps from the 90s only slower.

If the current state has no natural URL, it's not a legitimate part of the World-Wide Web. But most of the popular content accessible via the web now fits this description. Look at Google's own homepage, it's a complex Javascript application that's completely opaque. @bruceboughton is right, the problem isn't that people aren't respecting the WWW specification, it's that the specification is no longer adequate to des…

Google has competent web developers who practice progressive enhancement. Their search form and results have stable (even sensible) URLs and are perfectly usable without trusting their js.

Re: Broken Links

#95

Post by vannevar »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #94
vannevar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the current state has no natural URL, it's not a legitimate part of the World-Wide Web. But most of the popular content accessible via the web now fits this description. Look at Google's own homepage, it's a complex Javascript application that's completely opaque. @bruceboughton is right, the problem isn't that people aren't respecting the WWW specification, it's that the specification is no longer adequate to des…

Google has competent web developers who practice progressive enhancement. Their search form and results have stable (even sensible) URLs and are perfectly usable without trusting their js.

Sure the application has a URL. But once I load it, it constructs what I see on the page on the fly. I can turn Javascript off and load an alternate page, but if I leave it on I'm loading an application that's every bit as opaque as Flash.
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