Twitter to move away from Hashbangs • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#31

Post by MBCook » Mon, Feb 20, 2012, 11:45 PM UTC

intellection wrote: post #26

zaidf wrote: post #24

I thought this was about twitter moving away from hashtags. For some reason I got a bit excited, may be because I find vast majority of hashtags to be annoying noise. That said, I know they serve a purpose in specific use cases and donno a better alternative.

Is it un/reasonable to consider moving hashtags out of tweets and into metadata or just separate? Just as useful, but can be styled separately. Evolved hashtags, backwards compatible.

That would make sense to me. I always thought it was odd that you weren't allowed to attach a link as metadata, causing the rise of all the various URL shorteners.

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#32

Post by johnbender » Mon, Feb 20, 2012, 11:48 PM UTC

"PushState or bust" means there will be no support for IE version 9 or earlier, which makes me wonder if they'll take the approach of layering replaceState on top of the existing hashbangs thereby fixing the deeplinks issue.

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#33

Post by skeletonjelly » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 12:02 AM UTC

ecocentrik wrote: post #28

zaidf wrote: post #24

I thought this was about twitter moving away from hashtags. For some reason I got a bit excited, may be because I find vast majority of hashtags to be annoying noise. That said, I know they serve a purpose in specific use cases and donno a better alternative.

Hashtags were/are a Twitter user creation that they do very little to support apart from making them linkable within posts so they are easily searchable from their application interfaces.

Seems a bit disingenuous saying they do very little to support it. There was a big UI change in the latest official Twitter client that made a major tab for trends and hashtags. Seems to be a core facet to me.

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#34

Post by mvzink » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 12:08 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #20

mnutt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like they're switching to rendering on the backend, though. So you're most likely still going to have to execute a huge chunk of javascript before displaying the page, though hopefully it will get faster.

I'm hoping that they plan to serve up the HTML and CSS for the basic page as quickly as possible, then load the JS that adds the pushState / interactive stuff asynchronously. A page with a single tweet on really shouldn't need to pull down much code. The JS can all be cached by the browser (far future expires headers etc) and there are some neat tricks you can do with app cache and localStorage to make that work even…

Indeed, one always hopes they do the right thing :P

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#35

Post by sjs » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 12:25 AM UTC

mnutt wrote: post #16

simonw wrote: post #2

This is fantastic news. From the recent tweets by https://twitter.com/danwrong it looks like Twitter are moving entirely to HTML5 pushState, and leaving IE users with full page refreshes rather than continuing to serve them #! - Dan says "I'm not sure why everyone is so adverse to page refreshes these days. You can make them fast too." Of course, Twitter are going to have to include a piece of JavaScript on the http:…

It doesn't sound like they're switching to rendering on the backend, though. So you're most likely still going to have to execute a huge chunk of javascript before displaying the page, though hopefully it will get faster.

Dan says he is on the job.

https://twitter.com/#!/danwrong/status/171730032807518210

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#36

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 12:26 AM UTC

I especially agree with that last comment, people are so hyping over not making pages refresh for speed, they rather often trigger the opposite effect.

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#37

Post by jquery » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 12:27 AM UTC

Twitter's implementation of the hashbang was awful. It broke the back button and it was slow. I don't think it's a fair representation of the technique.

EDIT: And based on their implementation, I wouldn't trust anything their engineers have to say about hashbangs either.

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#38

Post by jordhy » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 12:29 AM UTC

kylemaxwell wrote: post #23

Can somebody explain to non-web-types why this matters, other than making the URL itself look cleaner?

Several issues: back button programability, URIs become uglier so then you need to do some parsing, etc.

The sample the pros and cons of hashbangs, refer to the discussion on this page: http://ask.metafilter.com/187222/Whats-wrong-with-using-hash...

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#39

Post by n8agrin » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 12:31 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #20

mnutt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like they're switching to rendering on the backend, though. So you're most likely still going to have to execute a huge chunk of javascript before displaying the page, though hopefully it will get faster.

I'm hoping that they plan to serve up the HTML and CSS for the basic page as quickly as possible, then load the JS that adds the pushState / interactive stuff asynchronously. A page with a single tweet on really shouldn't need to pull down much code. The JS can all be cached by the browser (far future expires headers etc) and there are some neat tricks you can do with app cache and localStorage to make that work even…

This is what they do.

Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs

#40

Post by firefoxman1 » Tue, Feb 21, 2012, 12:35 AM UTC

Even though Twitter has decided it's either "pushstate or bust" what sort of fallback for pushstate exists for those of us who care about all our users, not just the ones with good browsers?