Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
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Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
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Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#2This 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://twitter.com/ homepage which checks for a #! and redirects the user to the corresponding page - and they'll have to keep that JavaScript there forever, since they have nearly two years worth of links that they need to avoid breaking. One of the many reasons #! is such a nasty hack.
In terms of performance, this is going to make Twitter a lot /faster/ for me - I often open Twitter profile pages in new windows (due to working on Lanyrd) and each new window has to pull in and execute a HUGE chunk of JavaScript before it will display the page. Being able to just load a regular HTML page will be much faster for me.
Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#3Good. 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
Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#4The actual URL for the informative blog post is this: http://danwebb.net/2011/5/28/it-is-about-the-hashbangs
The linked blog post only contains some relatively meaningless Twitter messages and the hyperlink as text, not as an actual link.
One of the things the post doesn't mention (it's sort of implicit in "going under the radar") is that with hash bangs, every request has double the round trip time to retrieve the initial data being displayed, as the server cannot know what data the client wants to retrieve. This makes a lot of nifty performance optimizations impossible.
Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#5Good. 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
Do you know how long ago Gawker dropped them?
Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#6Good. 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
[deleted]
Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#7Good. 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
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
Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#8The actual URL for the informative blog post is this: http://danwebb.net/2011/5/28/it-is-about-the-hashbangs The linked blog post only contains some relatively meaningless Twitter messages and the hyperlink as text, not as an actual link. One of the things the post doesn't mention (it's sort of implicit in "going under the radar") is that with hash bangs, every request has double the round trip time to retrieve the i…
Only inter-site links incur the double round trip (and in NewTwitter's case, serious load time); intra-site links should be faster.
Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#9This 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't they just do a one-line .htaccess regex replace? or is it more complicated than that?
Re: Twitter to move away from Hashbangs
#10The actual URL for the informative blog post is this: http://danwebb.net/2011/5/28/it-is-about-the-hashbangs The linked blog post only contains some relatively meaningless Twitter messages and the hyperlink as text, not as an actual link. One of the things the post doesn't mention (it's sort of implicit in "going under the radar") is that with hash bangs, every request has double the round trip time to retrieve the i…
Only inter-site links incur the double round trip (and in NewTwitter's case, serious load time); intra-site links should be faster.
"intra-site links should be faster"
Why? With proper caching, all you need is the new content. Which possibly entails a few KB of HTML boilerplate and a few milliseconds for the browser to render it, but the round trip is the lengthy part and you get that either way. The only thing hashbangs get you is a prettier transition.