User pages linking to the site's /api route?

Question

I was on my profile page just now, and I wanted to see my questions sorted by the amount of votes, so I clicked the votes button. However, the link did not go to my profile page, but rather to this API link.

Answer 1

This is expected value.

Let's look at a profile page for a second, I'll choose one at random:

Wow, who gave this Jerk all that rep?

Notice I've hovered over the newest button. At the bottom of the screen, chrome is telling me this links to:

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/api/userquestions.html?userid=102&page=1&pagesize=10&sort=newest

If I open this in a new tab I can even see that page. This is the page that Arda was referring to.

Alright, cool, but let's dig deeper:

The button in question actually is an href to that page:

<a title="sort by creation date" href="/api/userquestions.html?userid=102&amp;page=1&amp;pagesize=10&amp;sort=newest">newest</a>

But when I click it, I don't end up at that page. So what's going on here? Instead of taking me to the api page, my webbrowser seems to be taking me to:

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/users/102/tzenes#qpage_1-apage_1-qsort_newest-asort_votes

Which is where I expect to be.

To find out why this is happening, let's visit this page with javascript disabled.

In addition to a big warning at the top saying: Gaming - Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled, now when I click the newest link I'm taking to the api page.

AHA! Jeff is doing some sneaky javascript to make sure I don't end up on the api page. That sneaky sneak, and when I turn off my javascript (or use a whitelist) all of a sudden I'm taken to the API page instead!

SUCCESS

---

So look at the javascript in question. Not very pretty. Jeff's a smart cookie and has minified his Javascript to decrease page load time. Luckily I have a Javascript un-minifier. Oooo, pretty.

Let's highlight some important chunks in the code:

function loadAnswers(b, a) {
    loadUrl("/api/useranswers.html?pagesize=" + answersPageSize + "&userId=" + userId, "#answers-table", b, a)
}

and

$("#answer-pager a, #tabs-answer-user a").live("click", function () {
        var b = parsePagedUrl(this.href);
        loadAnswers(b.page, b.sort);
        a.update({
            apage: b.page,
            asort: b.sort
        });
        $.history.load(a.toUrl());
        return false
    });

Looks like he's over loading the click function to instead use an Ajax call to retrieve the data. From the looks of it Jeff has so much faith in his API he's even making the call right to it to get the data! He then updates the tables, and even adds this into the history. Very chic

Answer 2

Starting with the next build, these links will work when opening in a new tab, etc. The user page should function the same as before, but be quite a bit cleaner behind the scenes, enjoy.

-- Nick Craver

Answer 3

What web browser? I have heard of this before, but we can never reproduce it.