The default behaviour of a web page is that the browser displays it "from the top". I can request it to be displayed from a specific bookmark if I set for example the id="my_bookmark" attribute to an element in the page and then request the URL mywebsite.com/mypage.html#my_bookmark.
I feel like there has to be a way to change this behaviour so that a page will automatically load at a specified bookmark further down the page, because that seems to me like a no-brainer, yet I can't find anything on that. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places ?
Specific questions :
Is there a simple HTML5 way to do this ? Like some sort of <meta> tag or other that tells the browser at what bookmark to load a page by default ?
Failing that, I'm curious : how are bookmarks handled at all ? I feel like if they're included in the URL it has to be because the server does something with that information; can I do anything about the bookmarks with PHP ? Or even with the damned .htaccess file ?
If this feature doesn't exist anywhere, is there a good reason that I just don't see ? It does seem to me like it's a very straightforward thing.
If you're wondering, my use case is this : I'm making a web-based game that has the player move through a story by solving puzzles. Every so often the player discovers a new "bit" of the story (a couple of new paragraphs). When they do, they are taken to story.php where all the pieces of the story that they have so far discovered will be displayed, in reading order, from top to bottom. But I want the player to land on story.php directly at the last bit of the story that they discovered, and I want them to scroll up if they want to read the previous stuff. I feel like that has to be doable, and fairly simple.
The stuff I know : Some HTML5, some CSS, some PHP. I don't really want to use a specific new PHP library if it means I have to install it, and I feel like I want to avoid JavaScript, but maybe you can talk me into it.
If you already have the proper anchor tags in place, just point your links at story.php#anchor.
There's no way of identifiying these "Fragments" in PHP or telling the browser to scroll to a specific position from PHP, though. The Fragments are never sent to the webserver and only used internally by the Browser. And the position of the scrollbar is controlled by the browser based on the size of the content corresponding to the size of the Browser Window and screen resolution, neither of which is known to the server-side PHP code.
You can use the window.scrollTo function to scroll to a specific coordinate in your document. (See: https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/API/Window/scrollTo)
I recently created an image that automatically changes depending on the time thanks to a PHP script. I'm now thinking about doing something but I'm not sure if it's possible.
I do have restrictions. I need this to work on a forum board so it means I have to have all scripting on a different server. I would Google how to do this but I'm not sure what to search hence the broad title. If someone could possibly tell me if it's possible and show a small example to get me on the right track, that'd be appreciated.
What I need to do is print text out onto the page. As I stated above, all the scripting needs to be on a different server as the forum doesn't allow for php and only basic HTML (similar to here). This means I can't use include 'file.php';.
IMHO You have two options
Use HTML iframe element to embeed the external content (just give the external URL and the browser will handle the rest)
Call ajax request from javascript and inject the result into the DOM tree of the board.
Now that Your decision what suits You more.
I have a very large site and it takes pretty long time to load. It takes around 120 seconds. What I'm trying to do is loads 1st half of the site loads 1st. Then user can surf while others parts are being loaded.
What I'm trying to do is below.
1st of all is this possible ?
According to my knowledge Yes since Google PageSpeed does that. But the problem is if I use PageSpeed I would have to change my DNS server settings and etc. I would like to do this myself.
How can I get it done ?
What type of technology should I use ?
Given that pages have the .php extension and written in PHP language.
You can use the concept of lazy loading.
You can load only content that is necessary during the load then using jquery and ajax you can load the remaining content.
In this way user can surf and interact easily with the the part already loaded while the other part will be loading asynchronously.
jQuery ajax or post method can help you on this.
A simple example could be,
If There are 5 parts of contents in your page, 2 needs to be loaded immediately
The page will be loaded with 2 parts loaded, so it will take quite less time than 5 parts loading
After document is loaded you will use ajax to load the remaining 3 parts.
Ajax will send request to the specific page of your website(can be possibly named AjaxRequestHandler.php) with some parameters, and this page will process your request and generate html for this and will send it back to your main page which will just show this returned html and this all be happening asynchronously, so the user will be able to communicate with the initially loaded 2 parts
And even if you are new to web technologies, I suppose you have to have the knowledge of atleast ajax and asynchronous calls etc. to achieve lazy loading.
Edit :
For your this question
Except AJAX Is there way around for this?
I think you can try iframes if they can help.
Loading the main content in the page load without iframe while loading other contents in the iframes after pages is loaded.
This jsFiddle
jsfiddle.net/cGDuV/
can help you understand lazy loading with iframe, mentioned in this post of stackoverflow.
You can use javascript for the same if you want to avoid jquery.
You can manipulate the output buffer such that it flushes early thus achieving what your after in the screenshot you posted in your question.
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2013/01/31/http-archive-adding-flush/
You can lazyload all your images. Here's a jquery plugin that does it easily
http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload
You can combine all your js in one file. Same with your css files. This will help the speed.
You can incorporate caching, expires headers and gzip/deflate compression
https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/dist/.htaccess
I would suggest you load your 3rd party javascript widget garbage (Google+ buttons, fabebook like buttons, social, twitter stuff) in a non blocking asynchronous way so it does not slow down the page in the beginning.
http://css-tricks.com/thinking-async/
Optimize your images as much as possible.
http://kraken.io/
Use a CDN
http://www.maxcdn.com/
Finally test your site and see where is the big bottleneck and where you can improve the site for speed optimization. Use the waterfall chart feature
http://www.webpagetest.org/
One of the things you can do is to load all the essential (top half) of the page normally, then use javascript/ajax to load the second half of the page. This is a very common technique (and is often used to load images).
Here is an excellent tutorial from jQuery for Designers, walking through how to use jQuery to load images asynchronously after the page loads. http://jqueryfordesigners.com/image-loading/
Having said that, a two minute load time seems very excessive. Maybe you should check if there is anything that could be slowing down your server.
You need to determine why the site is loading slow. What is the size of the data you are sending? Google and Firefox have web developer tools to help you determine which elements are taking the longest too load. Once you've determined the culprit, try to load the worst offenders asynchronously.
Check out this article on aync requests: https://segment.io/blog/how-to-make-async-requests-in-php/
in my opinion you need an endless scrolling solution. That is, have a fixed amount of content per "page" (could be an estimated 1500px worth of height). Use jQuery to load another "page" when user scrolls down by a set amount.
If you really want to unconditionally load all the content, just use the same approach, and on document ready trigger the next page to load. The loop the page loader until the whole thing is loaded. That way, you load the first "page", and defer the content "below the fold" to subsequent requests.
What you want is what Facebook does Bigpipe and here is a relevant SO post: Facebook Bigpipe Technique Algorithm
There are other solutions involving all sorts of Javascript but since you want PHP and Facebook uses PHP you should read up on Bigpipe. Juho even has an example written in PHP so that should meet your PHP requirements (but yes it still requires js but not AJAX).
Prefetching Resources the web page require large files for loading can often benefited from changing the order that those files are requested from the server. Sometimes, it makes sense to download files before they are necessary, so that they are instantly available once requested. When the resources required for a page can be loaded in advance, the user-perceived network latency for that page can be significantly reduced or even eliminated. When you run Google pagespeed insights and see the result, you will see how the fix the problems in your website.
Some tips to load site faster:
Make fewer HTTP requests
Add a far-future expires header
Gzip your page's components
Minify your JavaScript, CSS and HTML
One more thing when loading a webpage and if you are using php with smarty you can use this plugin which reduces the number of http requests to you server and makes the site load faster by combining all the js and css resource's request into one single HTTP request.
Alternatively you might be looking for these plugins.
http://masonry.desandro.com/
http://isotope.metafizzy.co/
http://www.wookmark.com/jquery-plugin
Does all this stuff have to be on the same page? Does it make sense to split the content over multiple pages? Can some of it be delayed until the person requests it? Can it be grouped into tabs? Hidden tabs could be lazy loaded for instance.
Give serious thought to restructuring the content in other ways. You might be able to come up with an alternate arrangement that simplifies the problem.
Having in mind all that was mentioned above you may think of caching parts of your data/html code with memcache or in any other way possible so you skip its generation every time. Of course this depends pretty much on how often the data changes.
Don't browsers render the document as it comes in? Whatever you put at the top of the file will be received by the client first, and therefore will be displayed first. For example, when you try to view a very large image file online, it loads from top to bottom. The same is true for web pages. Just put the content you want to load first at the top of the page!
Answer to question one: yes
Answer to question two: above
Answer to question three: Nothing, just put the page in the correct order.
Well the idea is more or less the same as described by Pawan Nogariya above. You will need to fetch views and data asynchronously and then display these. But this means that you will never redirect or post back to any other page rather will get every view via ajaz. This will make you application SPA (Single Page Application) like Gmail. And, this will also mean you need to keep track of what has been renedered and what not, leaving you in a mess. So, instead of doing everything your way there are already developed and popular frameworks available that let you do that but they also make it SPA. Which means that your application doesnt "posts" to the server as in redirection but everything is doen using Ajax.
You can use Backbone (Backbone.js), Knockout (Knockout.js) and may others to achieve this. These are javascript based frameworks that help achieving what you have just asked and may expample and tutorials are also easily available. You can use it with any language as we are using it with C# (MVC) for a relatively large applicaiton.
this is going to be ugly! You should definitely consider using ajax calls to load page fragments AFTER a first content stage is loaded!
This is going to break almost all known web standards, but it might render the website in parts....
this being said: here's the ugly stuff
First: get rid of the <html> tag of your website, start with the <head> DO NOT use a <body> tag either.
Now send your html-code in the order you want it to be loaded (top first) using echo ...
after each closing tag of a group (say </table> or </div>) use flush(); ob_flush(); this will send all known content to the browser immediately.
The browser now decides if it can render the known content or not and if it will (based on the browser specifics and user settings) but with few exceptions it will.
some browsers like to wait for the closing body-tag that's why we dropped it, others even wait for the closing html tag (safari afair) that's why we dropped that too.
If you use the echo-flush scenario wisely you should be able to split the page into renderable parts which most browsers will display without an error.
Again... don't do it this way.. it's bad, ugly and not even near any web standards
But you asked for it.
For your this question
Except AJAX Is there way around for this?
I think you can try iframes if they can help.
Loading the main content in the page load without iframe while loading other contents in the iframes after pages is loaded.
This jsFiddle
jsfiddle.net/cGDuV/
can help you understand lazy loading with iframe, mentioned in this post of stackoverflow.
You can use javascript for the same if you want to avoid jquery.
With pure PHP? Not smart.
$(function() {
$('#body').delay(1).fadeOut();
});
Fiddle example: http://jsfiddle.net/r7MgY/
I assume the answer is: "it is not possible because php is server language not client language", but I would like someone more expert than me to state this and eventually list all possible workarounds...
Question: is it (at all) possible to have a php function executed (only) when the user "clicks" or performs some other kind of action (e.g. mouse-over) in an html page without using any javascript?
(P.S. As a workaround I considered to access an intermediate page containing the php code to be executed when the client action occurs and then redirect as needed but this is not straightforward as far as passing the results of the php code goes.)
In general no. The only workaround regarding mouse-overs I can possibly think of would be a small 1x1 transparent background image that is generated by a PHP script and that is only shown if a user hovers over a certain element.
html:
<div id="mouseover_php">execute php</div>
css:
#mouseover_php:hover {
background-image:url(/path/to/php-script)
}
php:
<?php
// your code
// set http headers to correct content type and to disable caching
// output 1x1 pixel transparent image
But as all modern browsers use pre-fetching and caching (although this can be influenced by setting the Cache Control header) I certainly would not rely on this as an unquestionable indicator for a mouse-over event. So this would be, if anything, a very unclean hack.
Regarding clicks: Here the only possible way is to load an intermediate page, just as you proposed it. As far as I am concerned there is no way to achieve this without AJAX.
This is not possible without making a new request.
You must use a link to send the user to a new page (or the same page -- anything as long as a new request is made), or you must use something like AJAX.
There is actually one very hack-ish way I can think of. It's not exactly pretty, but it should work.
You could use an iframe as the target for a link. Basically instead of a link opening in the same or a new window, it would open in a hidden iframe.
Untested, but in theory:
<iframe name="testframe" id="testframe"></iframe>
Test
Edit: After some rough testing, it looks like chrome will not obey this. IE9 will to some extent though, it seems.
I see Google doing this all the time. They are able to successfully create a lightbox that can't be ignored... and even though the content behind it is visible (i.e. a form you would otherwise be able to fill out), you cannot do anything with that content-- I've even tried using the Document Inspector to get around the forced lightbox, and it's very, very difficult.
So, I'm not as concerned with the validation of the content BEHIND the box as I am with really nailing home the point that the lightbox is "not to be messed with". In other words, what's the best way to show a box that the user isn't supposed to (or able to) click out of until they've completed the action thereupon, while simultaneously showing a desaturated or partially whitened-out (but still visible) version of the content behind it?
As I said, I can code to make certain that the content behind the box isn't actually usable unless the requisite actions have been completed (so even if they get around it, it won't be functional). I just want to be a bit more stern with the people out there (like me) who will try simple things like a JavaScript blocker to prevent the content from lightboxing properly. Ideally, the solution I'm looking for would be cross-platform compatible and difficult to get around. I'm open to any type of solution that can be done via open-source code.
http://fancybox.net/
has an option hideOnContentClick: false that will only allow the user to click the "X" button in the fancy box to hide it. You could hide the "X" close button through css or take it out completely and have a javascript call when the user has completed all the fields or submitted to close the box.
Hope I read your question right.
Most lightbox features come with this. However, making your own, it's a 2 layer concept. 2 DIV's basically. One which spans to all 4 corners of the open browser. Most people will give it a color or something black and then set a transparency on it. After that you set a high zindex on it. Once you have that one in place you put another DIV inside of that one to mimic your lightbox needs. This way a user can't just click around the box and get to what they want. All in all though, javascript and CSS are easy to work around, all you need is a developer tool in your browser to just turn them off leaving you with only the raw form.
EDIT
Bottom line is, anything in the client side is always fallible. If someone's determined enough they will get around it. And if your doing it as a means of security from bots, that won't work, if someone who controls the bot is smart enough. I'm only saying this cause I hope there's not any false hopes that it will be a means to an end of a problem some how. Don't get me wrong it will detour many to a point, but those with malicious intent will break the concept easily with a little XSS or other various measures designed to break client-side only concepts.
EDIT 2
Both Jquery UI and Bootstrap from Twitter have good Dialog concepts that a normal every day user of your site won't be able to smash around easy.