41–50 of 82 posts
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.
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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.
Rolls eyes I don't need Twitter (140 characters should be enough for any application!) telling me how "fast" their pages load. Particularly coming from the notorious fail whale.
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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.
Hence, might as well make it a user-manageable item in the tweet itself.
Good. A lot of developers justified doing it in their own projects because Twitter and Gawker were doing it. Now that one of the headline sites is no longer using it (and will hopefully condem it) we can file this episode to history and never speak of it again. Edit: wouldn't it be awesome if Google (they did start this, afterall) would allow sites using hashbangs to auto-update all indexed URls
Where content is the main purpose ("websites"), they are overkill at best.
They can be useful though in functionality-first applications ("apps"), where the interface can be costly to build (too slow if you reload the whole "page" on each state change). Ideally, the app differentiates between fundamental states, represented in URLs, and transient states, represented in hashbangs.
Anyway, this is good news for Twitter, if they are really going through with it.
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:…
Can somebody explain to non-web-types why this matters, other than making the URL itself look cleaner?
It was hinted at in other comments, but when you go to http://twitter.com/#!/danwrong , what you're really doing is going to http://twitter.com/ , processing a chunk of JavaScript that looks at what's after the #!, then loading up danwrong's page. This causes issues with search engines (the server has already told the crawler everything's OK, so how do you tell it the page can't be found?) and changing URLs (if you w…
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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.
Second, the hashtags (as well as the @replies) both grew organically out of the userbase. They adopted them because the users had already adopted the hashtags. In fact, if I remember correctly, they were initially resistant to the idea until they saw how much people took to them and used them even without any official support.
The new tab seems like a glorified search - they use a hashtag for an icon, but it seems like the system itself would work pretty well for any single-word search. And with a data firehose as fast as Twitter's, you don't really want to have to do search over multiple words if you can avoid it.
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Do you know how long ago Gawker dropped them?
~6 months ago IIRC they constantly had problems with their redesign and the last update involved removing the hashbangs
I believe there were further tweaks for additional pages that needed to be supported (whereas I had only solved, and most likely not very elegantly, the rudimentary issue) that took additional time before the hash bang removal was actually launched.