I realized that many of web app use # in their app's URL.
For example, Google Analytics.
This address is in the URL bar when I am viewing the visitor's language page:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en#report/visitors-language/a33185827w60383872p61754588/
This address is in the address bar when I am viewing the visitors' geolocation page:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en#report/visitors-geo/a33185827w60383872p61754588/
I think that this is the Google Analytics web app passing #report/visitors-language and #report/vistiors-geo.
I know that Google analytics is using an <iframe>. It seems that only the main content box is changing when displaying content.
Is # used because of the <iframe> functionality?
There are several answers but none cover the backend part.
Here is a URL, one from your own example:
www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en#report/visitors-language/a33185827w60383872p61754588/
You can think about the post-hash (including the hash #) part as a client-side request.
The web server will never know what was entered after the hash sign. It is the browser pointing to a specific ID on the page.
For basic web pages, if you have this HTML: <a name="main">welcome</a>
on a web page at www.example.com/welcome, going to www.example.com/welcome#main will scroll your browser viewport to the welcome text in the <a> HTML tag.
The web server will not know whether #main was in the URL or not.
Values in the URL after a question mark are called URL parameters, e.g. www.example.com/?foo=bar. The web server can deliver different content based on those values.
However, there is a technology developed by Google called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) that makes use of the # part in the URL to deliver different content without a page load. It's not using an <iframe>.
Using JavaScript, you can trigger a change in the URL's post-hash part and make a request to the server to get a specific part of the page, for example for the URL www.example.com/welcome#main2 Even if an element named #main2 does not exist, you can show one using JavaScript.
A hashbang is #!. It is used to make search engine indexing easier by indicating that this part is a dynamic web page.
This is the "hash" in the url.
Many browsers support hash change event in javascript.
as per my knowledge the hash change is the revolution in the ajax callbacks.
as such when the user interacts with the any link with a hash then on the hash change the event is fired and you can apply any thing with the javascript.
one more thing is that hash change is supported by the browser history.
see below URL
SEO and the use of !# in a url
or Read it
'#! is called a "hashbang" and they are the root of all that is evil in web development.'
Basically, weak web developers decided to use #anchor names as a kludgy hack to get "web 2.0" things to work on their page, then complained to google that their page rank suffered. Google made a work around to their kludge by enabling the hashbang.
Weak web developers took this work around as gospel. Don't use it. It is a crutch.
Web development that depends on hashbangs is web-development done wrong.
This article is far more well worded than I could ever be, and deals with the Gawker media fiasco from their migration to a (failed) hashbang centric website. It tells you WHAT is happening and why it's bad.
http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs
Correct me if I'm wrong, the hashtag in that URL would be used as an anchor to scroll the page to an element with an id. For example, I send you to the url http://example.com/sample#example, and the page would scroll (just display) at the element (I'm using a div as an arbitrary example, it could be anything).
Ajax and hash mark in the url mostly used for quick action.
If you have a part in your site that can be visible only by fire event (mostly click) - it would be hard to share it. With hash mark in the url you can (by javascript) make the browser think that you did the required action and it will display the relevant part.
Normally the '#' is using in url will find the particular id which is next to '#' in that particular page. By using this we can view the particular content at middle of the page also.
Related
I have http://mysite.com/index.php.
And a sub menu
home => http://mysite.com/index.php
about us => http://mysite.com/about.us.php
products => http://mysite.com/products.php
But i want http://mysite.com/index.php to process every request, and just change the content using Ajax request. This way, the site only loads the content part, and is much faster and easy to navigate.
The problem here is SEO, because the only URL google will see is http://mysite.com/index.php and I would like to associate http://mysite.com/about-us to the About Us content, http://mysite.com/product to the Products content, etc.
I know I can do this with PHP just reading the URL and writing the Ajax on the fly, but doing so the whole page is going to be reloaded every time.
Is there a way to do this without reloading the whole page?
What I think I need is to have a regular anchor in the submenu, for exampel pointing to "http://mysite.com/contact-us" but when clicked, instead of opening this page, process the Ajax request.
And if this is possible, Google is going to see this as black hat probably, right?
Regards
Alex
HERE THERE IS A SOLUTION:
window.history.pushState(data, title, url)
Here Rob explains how it works, and you have a working example:
http://moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate
you can't change the URL in the address bar without changing the page because to be able to do that I couldlet you visit me at http://www.imhackingyou.com/sucker but change the addressbar to read http://www.bankofamerica.com/login
This is a routing issue, not an AJAX issue.
If you were using another tool (cough ASP.NET MVC cough), you'd just add a route (and I'm hopeful there's a way to do this in PHP) that accepted URLS like
/home
/products
...
and routed them to, say,
/index.php?area=home
/index.php?area=products
This is typically accomplished with a rewrite engine when used outside of a good MVC or RESTful URL system. I use ISAPI Rewrite on IIS, but if you're working on the LAMP stack, I think Apache provides a module that provides the same capabilities. (Google .htaccess )
WARNING: RANT FOLLOWS
And, for what it's worth,
Avoid trying to write your entire application in JavaScript. The server's there for a reason. Part of your job as a web developer is to absorb as much of the work onto your server as possible. Browser performance and compatibility issues will drive you mad when you try to do everything on the client.
Avoiding postbacks makes sense in a lot of circumstances, but it's not a silver bullet that you should try to apply to every page. Usually it makes sense to load a new page when a link is clicked. It's what the user expects, it's more stable (since most of the infrastructure required is server-side) and it's not slower than an AJAX request to retrieve the same thing.
Rules:
NEVER break the back button. Without careful planning, most AJAX apps break this rule.
See rule #1.
This sounds like it should be accomplished with a rewrite engine, but assuming that you have a good reason to use AJAX, you can change urls with javascript by modifying the portion after the hash, or better yet, the hashbang:
window.location.hash = "#!about-us";
http://mysite.com/
http://mysite.com/#!about-us
http://mysite.com/#!products
For more info on the hashbang from an SEO perspective, check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content
How does Shopify do it then? Go to their website, click on the Features link and you'll see the URL says:
http://www.shopify.com/tour/sell-online
Then click on any of the sub links and you'll see that the address in the URl changes without using a hash but there is no page flip.
I don't think they are using ajax to change the content because it all appears to be included in hidden divs on the page, but regardless, you can apparently change the URL using client side tricks.
We are making a website that has a desktop and mobile part
but we would like to use the same URL for both of them and depending on the user-agent load in the correct html/css
for the desktop part we are using Ember and its routing capabilities
so for instance: http://domain.com/#!/newsitems/news-item-1
for our mobile part we would like not to use JS for our routing but manual page refreshes ( so our mobile site works on as many different devices possible )
so if i want to make a button that redirects to "news-item-1"
link
doesn't reload my page because it recognizes its Number sign.
Is there a possibility that i can refresh the page but still keep the url.
We would capture the URL in php and then display the correct html/css
The "fragment" of the URL is never passed to the server, it is stripped off by the browser for its own use. It is therefore impossible to directly read it in PHP.
What you can do instead is the opposite: for non-JS situations, the HTML should contain a normal URL like <a href="/foo">.... The JS can then enhance this by adding a #! as appropriate, dynamically changing the link to <a href="#!/foo">...
This general idea, that you write the simple code first and layer rich features on top, rather than embedding them in the code, is known as "progressive enhancement". It can be viewed as a solution to the problem of "graceful degradation", which is what you are trying to achieve in supporting as many platforms as possible.
As some of you may know, Google is now crawling AJAX. The implementation is by far something elegant, but at least it still applies to Yahoo and Bing AFAIK.
Context: My site is driven by Wordpress & HTML5. An Custom Post Type has tree types of content, and the contents of these are driven by AJAX. The solution I came for not using hashbangs (#!) until fully understand how to implement them is rather "risqué". Every link as HREF linking to *site.com/article-one/?tab=first_tab*, that shows only the contents of the selected tab (<div>Content...</div>). Like this:
This First Tab
As you may note, data-tab is the value that JavaScript sends with AJAX Get, that gets the related content and renders inside a container. At the other side, the server gets the variable and does a <?php get_template_part('tab-first-tab'); ?> to deliver the content.
About the risqué, well, I can see that Google and other search engines will fetch *http://site.com/article-one/?tab=first_tab* instead of http://site.com/article-one/, making users come to that URL instead of showing the home page with the tab content selected automatically.
The problem now is the implementation to avoid that.
Hashbang: From what I learned, I should do this.
HREF should become site.com/article-one/#!first-tab
JS should extract the "first-tab" of the href and pass it out to $_GET (just for the sake of not using "data-tab").
JS should change the URL to site.com/article-one/#!first-tab
JS should detect if the URL has #!first-tab, and show the selected tab instead of the default one.
Now, for the server-side implementation, here is where I'm kind lost in the woods.
How Wordpress will handle site.com/article-one/?_escaped_fragment_=first-tab?
Do I have to change something in .htaccess?
What should have the HTML snapshot? My guess is all the site, but with the requested tab showing, instead of showing only the content.
I think that I can separate what Wordpress will handle when it detects the _escaped_fragment_. If is requested, like by Google, it will show all the content plus the selected content, and if not, it's because AJAX is requesting it and will show only the content. That should be right?
I'm gonna talk third person.
Since this has no responses, I have a good one why you should not do this. Yes, the same reason why Twitter banged them:
http://danwebb.net/2011/5/28/it-is-about-the-hashbangs
Instead of doing hashbangs, you should make normal URIs. For example, an article with summary tab on should be "site.com/article/summary", and if it is the default one that pops out (or is it already requested) it also should change to that URI using pushState().
If the user selects the tab "exercises", the URL should change to "site.com/article/exercises" using pushState() while the site loads the content throught AJAX, and while you still maintain the original href to "site.com/article/exercises". Without JavaScript the user should still see the content - not only the content, the whole page with the tab selected.
For that to work, some editing to the .htaccess to handle the /[tab] in the URL should be done.
my question is about this website - http://www.bits-apogee.org/2011/
whenever you click on the link in the side navigation bar, the middle part of the website is dynamically loaded. Also, the url also changes, everything else remains unchanged. how is this done?
is this some query plugin?
I totally agree with #JMCCreative. It looks like it's an actual refresh. You should look at the following post on StackOverflow.
Modify the URL without reloading the page
The site is using Hashes (#) in the URL to denote the new content being loaded.
This is useful for people bookmarking dynamically loaded content (normally hashes load to specific areas on a page, named anchors or ID's for new browsers), because they don't trigger the page to refresh...
http://www.highrankings.com/urls-with-hashtags-307 there are drawback (SEO) concerns to this... however you will notice more and more sites doing it so i would assume the SEO robots will get better.
There are 2 possibilities:
You can use the HTML5 capabilities to change the url (history pushState), however this feature isn't available in all browsers yet. For more information, look at this SO post: Is there a way to change the browser's address bar without refreshing the page? .
You can use a hashtag (#) part as fall back for browsers who don't have above feature yet.
If you use jQuery, you can use the handy plug-in jQuery Address. This will take care of both above cases.
They're not using a plugin. They're doing an ajax request to a URL like this:
http://www.bits-apogee.org/2011/getcontent/?even=Rachel+Armstrong
and dumping the overview in the container.
The circle of this type of process is usually like this:
listen for link clicks
on click, prevent default on event.
user window.history.pushState to update url
some other code - hears new history
generates a url to get the content.
ajax load the url
dump the data into a container
2 Libraries I have used, both are easier than the above, as they rely on loading a regular html page via AJAX instead the example site you point to, which used a JSON format to get the data.
Pjax - update peices of the page, by pulling that HTML node from a different URL.
Ajaxify - easiest solution, you could do that effect on an HTML site in 10 minutes.
I am creating a web app in php. i am loading content through a ajax based request.
when i click on a hyperlink, the corresponding page gets fetched through ajax and the content is replaced by the fetched page.
now the issue is, i need a physical href so that i can implement facebook like functionality and also maintain the browser history property. i cannot do a old school POSTBACK to the php page as I am doing a transition animation in which the current page slides away and the new page slides in.
Is there a way I can keep the animation and still have a valid physical href and history.
the design of the application is such:
the app grabs an rss feed.
it creates the DOM for those rss feeds.
upon clicking on any headline, the page animates and takes to the full story of the rss feed.
i need to create "like" button on the full story page. but i dont have a valid url.
While Alexander's answer works great on the client side, Facebook's linter tool does not run javascript, so it will get the old content. Neither of the two links provide a solution to this.
What amit needs to implement is server-side parsing of the url. See http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php. Fragment is what the server sees as the hash tag value. In your php code, render the correct og: tags for based upon the fragment.
Firstly, if you need a URL for facebook then think up a structure that gives you one, such that your server-side code will load the correct page when given that URL. This could be something like http://yourdomain.com/page.php?feed=<feedname>&link=<linknumber>, which would allow you to check the parameters using the PHP $_GET array. If you don't have the parameters then load the index page; if you do then load the relevant article.
Secondly, use something like history.js to give you cross-browser support for the HTML5 pushState() functionality so that you can set the page URL when you do the AJAX call, without requiring the browser to do a full reload.
You have to implement hash navigation.
Here is short tutorial.
Here is more conceptual introduction.
If you're using jQuery, I can recommend BBQ for hash navigation:
http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/
This actually sounds pretty straight forward to me.
You have the urls as usual, using hash (#) you can extract the info both in the client and server side.
There is only one thing that is missing, on the server side before you return the content, check the user agent string and compare it to the facebook bot (if i'm not mistaken it's something like "facebookexternalhit"), if it turns out to be the facebook bot then return what ever you want which describes the url for a like/share (open graph meta data), and if it's any other user agent string return the content as usual.