koldfront

Using AJAX/HTML5 for navigation

🕦︎ - 2012-04-29

Video Recently it has become all the rage to use AJAX/HTML5 for navigation: instead of letting the browser fetch a page from scratch, a part (or all the content - I am looking at you, pjax) is fetched via AJAX and the URL is manipulated via the new pushState functionality introduced in HTML5.

While it is a very cute trick, it also demands a lot of the website developer to make it work right. Browsers have been through roughly two decades of evolution by now - do you think you can re-implement core browser behaviour in a couple of lines of Javascript?

If github can't, chances are you can't either. So checkout out why you should not do it.

I would love to be proven wrong. Leave a comment.

Update: Oh my gawd, even the new bobdylan.com uses this horrible abomination of a bad idea!

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