Internet Explorer 9 is already keeping everyone in the stone age

dugan · 01-17-2011, 05:01 PM

HTML 5 has an extremely cool and very useful history management feature, which you can read about here:

http://asciicasts.com/episodes/246-ajax-history-state
http://spoiledmilk.ch/blog/?p=1922

There is only one major browser whose development version doesn't support it.

Care to guess which one?

EDIT: actually, two. The other one is Opera, but you can expect Opera to improve.

silvyus_06 · 01-17-2011, 05:05 PM

firefox ? dang it .. i fail

( to even correctly open a web link . that link drives me to the safari browser codes i don't know what my brainz hurt.

where is the real link? have you got something else in your clipboard and pasted that instead?

dugan · 01-17-2011, 05:27 PM

Yeah, they're pretty technical links.

A lot of websites these days have controls that load data into certain parts of the page. What if you want to bookmark that data? Bookmarking only works with pages, not parts of pages. To make site like that bookmarkable, you need to load the data, then manipulate the address. Traditionally, this is done by adding a hash to the end of the address. Why? Because a hash is seen as an HTML anchor; it doesn't cause the user to suffer a page refresh. The HTML 5 proposal, however, allows the website to manipulate the whole address without causing a page refresh.

This works in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox (4). It does not work in the IE9 beta, which probably means that it won't be in IE for at least a decade.

silvyus_06 · 01-17-2011, 05:32 PM

i didn't really get it but since it's also on firefox 4(i use it right now) it's ok

cantab · 01-17-2011, 06:09 PM

So, a web page is allowed to change the URL the viewer sees to an arbitrary value? Sounds like a belated Christmas present for phishers to me. IE9 may have the right idea leaving it out.

dugan · 01-17-2011, 06:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cantab

So, a web page is allowed to change the URL the viewer sees to an arbitrary value? Sounds like a belated Christmas present for phishers to me.

Not any arbitary value. The host and protocol (EDIT: and port) still need to be the same.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Sam...for_JavaScript

Yes, I know that contradicts what I said about "the whole address." I should have been more precise.

Latios · 01-18-2011, 05:14 AM

Isnt there ajax etc for this ? It still is very prone to abuse even if the protocol and domain name are correct, for example sites stored as http://www.blogs.com/~latios/

dugan · 01-18-2011, 08:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Latios

Isnt there ajax etc for this ?

Other way around. It's to support AJAX.

GitHub is already using it in production. Here's the blog entry announcing it. Most of the blog entry is a screencast of its new UI in action, so don't worry about it being as technical as my previous links.

https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider