Simon Willison’s Weblog

URLs are supposed to represent resources. A web app can be a resource, and there are techniques for managing state within those. Hashbangs might be one of these. But when large web properties are converting all their links to articles and other bits of text (tweets/twits/whatever) into these monstrosities, it’s not innovation. It’s a huge mistake that ought to be regretted now and will certainly be regretted in the future.

— Reed Underwood

# 10th February 2011, 4:56 pm / urls, recovered, hashbanghell

Before events took this bad turn, the contract represented by a link was simple: “Here’s a string, send it off to a server and the server will figure out what it identifies and send you back a representation.” Now it’s along the lines of: “Here’s a string, save the hashbang, send the rest to the server, and rely on being able to run the code the server sends you to use the hashbang to generate the representation.” Do I need to explain why this is less robust and flexible? This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.

— Tim Bray

# 10th February 2011, 6 am / javascript, urls, recovered, hashbanghell