If you carefully notice facebook, you will understand that the when you visit one page to another then the whole page is not refreshed or redirected but the URL changes when navigating to new page. It is more clear when chat windows are open, they remains static during page loading. As other website does this by using the # but facebook does not.
There is another example came to me: http://www.davidwalsh.name/. Visit the site and open other pages within their site and you will understand what I mean. Don't forget to notice the URL change.
How they do this?
Added More: I want a way that the page content will be loaded with ajax, change the URL for bookmark feature but when changing URL it should not reload / refresh the page by not using # (hash).
You have two questions:
For the URL change you can put the path instead of the # in the href property of the anchor (e.g /otherlink).
For opening the chat or opening some div does not require to send it in the url, its the onclick event on the div and its expands. Also the chat remains open may be thay set cookie or flag when the chat is first time opened and checking and changing the chat with flag they are setting.
As suggested by #andytuba
For Facebook, Google "hash navigation ajax".
For DavidWalsh, google "history API".
Related
I'm taking an online course from a site that does not provide for asking questions about the content, so I am asking you.
This is one of the MUSTS for page titles:
"On a so-called single-page application — in which AJAX is used to bring in new content without refreshing or loading the entire web page — any time that the URL changes, the page title should be updated accordingly"
I always thought that if you used ajax to change part of a page the page itself would remain static. That is why would a URL change with an AJAX call. Are there any examples showing what this looks like?
AJAX requests don’t change the browser URL or history. To mimic the behaviour of traditional websites, single page apps will modify the URL and history and use the URL to change the view.
For more on changing the browser history, see Adding and modifying History entries.
I am just wondering how facebook manage requests to "my profile page" and "home page" and some other pages that seem to reload just some content.
For example when I am on "my profile page" on facebook, i Hit the home button and the top bar button and chat panel on right side remain intact (they are not reloaded). I have monitored XMLHTTPRequest in webkit console and no ajax is generated, so its not Ajax (i think). Otherwise, if FULL http requests are generated when clicking those links, I thought the full page must be reloaded, I am right? So I have no clue how is this handled. Can you give me a hand please?
Thanks :)
It's a type of performance optimization called "quickling", they also use a "pagecache" strategy to reduce the data from server. In the lower level, it depends on javascript perform as a LinkController, which delegate a hyper-link click event and then send an ajax (or use iframe) to request the pagelet data from server, the response will be a json-formed data structure, then javascript will insert the content of current page. Uri in your address bar can be dealled with the hash change event in old browsers and H5's History API (pushState) to manage the history record of browser.
If using the current Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, when switching between
http://www.facebook.com/my_name
http://www.facebook.com
The side panel for feed and chat, and any chat box actually stays. I thought when the URL changes, the page has to refresh as a whole, but obviously, this is not the case here. How is that done?
On IE 9, the URL actually became http://www.facebook.com/#! and using the "hash" to do ajax without refreshing the page, which is more understandable.
You can change the URL and page history from javascript without actually reloading the page.
See this answer on another question.
Note, that if you type the new URL by yourself and press enter the whole page reloads.
this might be the internal linking in the webpage with hidden DIVs with IDs and onClick those Hidden DIVs get visible with javascript and with AJAX content is loaded it will be a good if you browse the site disabling javascipt
I am looking at the Gawker blogs (http://io9.com, http://lifehacker.com/) and I'm curious about how they are made.
When I click for on a link only the article part of the page reloads displaying a loading icon while it does.
But what I can't figure out is that links point to new URLs like io9.com/something/something and its not something like I see on ajax pages that they put a site.com/#something tag at the end of the url from javascript to mark the page after an ajax request.
Can I change the full blown URL from javascript or what is happening?
When it happens, the website is using the HTML5 History API. This API can change the url (via JavaScript) without changing the page.
See caniuse.com for browser support.
If you would like to implement it in yout website, backbonejs.org would be very useful.
I am trying to implement content browsing like it is done on Facebook when user is browsing the photos. I guess everyone is familiar with that photo browsing where you can click "next" and "previous" and immediately get the next or previous photo (you can also navigate using arrow keys).
When you click "next" for example you notice that the page does not refresh - only the content. At first I thought it is done using plain ajax calls which refresh only the "content" in this case the image, description and comments. But then I noticed that also URL in the "Location" toolbar of my browser is changed!
I tried to inspect this using Firebug and discovered that when you click "next" only the next photo is downloaded and I still don't know from where the comments & image meta data (description, time, tags,...) are loaded.
Can someone please explain how this technique is done - page URL changes without page refresh (or even without page "blinking" if it refreshes from cache).
I know how to change page content using ajax but URL of that page stays the same all the time. If I click on "refresh" button I get the first page again. But not on Facebook since even the "window.location" is changed every time without actual redirect.
The other thing I noticed is that the bottom toolbar (applications, chat, ...) is "always on top". Even if you change the page, this toolbar is not refreshed and always stays on top - it doesn't even "blink" like other pages that are refreshed (either from webserver or from local cache). I guess this is the same technique as above - some kind of "fake" redirects or something?
The Answer is pushState
if (window.history.pushState)
window.history.pushState([object or string], [title], [new link]);
You will smile :)
I've tried to change through facebook images, and this is what I saw:
In Firefox:
The page URL is not changing. Only the hash is changing. This is a technique used to allow crawlers to index the content. What happens is this:
User clicks on "next"
JS loads the next image with tags, comments, etc and replaces the old content with them.
JS changes the hash to correspond the new image
urls look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/photo.php?fbid=1550005942528966&set=a.1514725882151300.28042.100000570788121&pid=3829033&id=1000001570788121 (notice the hash)
As for the second question, this is just a benefit of the technique above. When you are on facebook, the page rarely gets actually refreshed. Only the hash is changed so that you can send links to other people and crawlers can index the content.
In Google Chrome:
It seems that chrome hassome way to change urls without refreshing the page. It does that by using window.history.pushState. Read about it here.
urls look like this: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1613802157224343&set=a.1514725288215100.28042.1000005707388121&pid=426541&id=1000001570788121 (notice that there is no hash here, but still the url is changing along with images)
In Epiphany:
Epiphany doesn't change the URL when the image changes.
urls look like this: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1441817122377521&set=a.1514725882215100.28042.1000005707848121&pid=3251944&id=1000200570788121 (there is no hash, and the URL stays the same when changing the image)
(don't have other browsers to verify right now)
The one technique not mentioned here is the window.onhashchange() method (supported in ie8+ and most others) which they might have used
You may noticed that the page url remain the same. What is changed, however, is page hash (the part after # in the url).
You need something like this: http://code.google.com/p/reallysimplehistory/