Start page load while closing animations - javascript

Question: With Javascript, can you tell the web browser to begin loading a page, but don't begin rendering it yet?
Issue: A client wants his web page to show listings like a book. When you click on the next button, he doesn't want the next page to immediately load. He wants the book to close (a closing animation) and then load the next page.
Current status: All links go to Javascript. I show the closing animation. Then, I replace the window location. The issue is that there is a clear wait for the next page to load. It would be nice if I could load the following page into cache while the closing animation runs. In other words, I want to make that three-second animation useful time by loading all the HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images for the following page and then all that happens when I set the new location is that it renders.
Possible solution: I have the main page that had two full-screen iframes in it. One iframe is the current page. The other is hidden and is used to load the next page. After the animation, I flip which iframs is visible and which isn't. This is good except that the back button doesn't work properly. If you click back, you go to wherever you were before you went to the website. You don't hide the current iframe and show the one you just hid. If you click back twice, flipping iframes doesn't work. I have to keep a log of your history. Further, I have to hack the back button, which I don't like. So, I'd like to use a built-in cache method if I can.

Possible solution: I have the main page that had two full-screen iframes in it. One iframe is the current page. The other is hidden and
is used to load the next page. After the animation, I flip which iframes is visible and which isn't.
Yes, this sounds like a good approach.
This is good except that the back button doesn't work properly. [...]
I have to hack the back button, which I don't like.
Single Page Applications (SPAs) can't use the back button as originally intended because the entire application exists within a single document.
Partly in response to this, we have
history.pushState()
which is a really good extension to the History API, enabling new "artificial" entries (describing new states) to be added to the browser's history, which, in turn, enables the back button to work exactly as the user might expect it to.
Further Reading:
http://html5doctor.com/history-api/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History/pushState

Related

Audio continuously playing across all pages?

Is this even possible? To have an mp3 play where it left off when you navigate to a different page on the same website? I seriously don't even know where to begin. Kind of new to HTML, CSS, etc.
Any Ideas? Thanks.
Not across multiple page loads. But you can have a single page which plays audio and provides navigation therein for the user. A couple overarching structural options would include:
Create a Single Page Application (SPA). Here your one "page" would play the audio, and the site navigation would happen within this single page instance with JavaScript/AJAX. The browser would only ever load one "page", but the overall application would dynamically load/unload as elements of that page as you see fit.
(A very old method, but still works) Create a parent page with frames for navigation. The parent (frame) page would contain the audio, and the rest of the navigation through the application would be done in frames within that page.
I'd recommend the first approach, but either would work.
If you reload the entire page (and therefore the audio source), there is no way to provide a seamless playback. There will always be a very noticeable gap due to page load times, even if you try to keep track of the position within the audio track. Slow internet connections will make it worse.
Instead, you can embrace one of those four options:
Single Page App:
As also pointed out by David, my suggestion would be to create a single page application, i.e. a page that loads once, then loads/replaces all additional content dynamically. One the user clicks a navigation link, instead of loading a new page (or reloading the current page), you just replace the main content, using AJAX. The part that provides the audio stays in place.
Additional tab/popup/window
You could create an additional tab, popup window or window just for the sake of playing the audio. One example of this is the German radio station "radioeins". At the time of writing, their website provides an orange button in the top right that will open a popup window for their live stream, allowing the user to continue browsing their website with the music continuing to play uninterruptedly from the popup. I would only go down this route if the single page app is not an option, as popups or additional tabs are bad UX and popups might be blocked by browsers.
iframe
You could provide the main content of your page within an iframe, or the other way round, provide the audio from within an iframe. I would recommend against this, as there are several disadvantages to this approach.
Frames
Frames would provide a similar approach to iframes, but they are deprecated, so I strongly recommend against this one as well.
tl;dr
Make it a single page application if you can, otherwise resort to a popup-solution.

Remove/Hide div From Website

I have a css animation that essentially slides two images with a high z-index off the screen revealing the website content below it on the home page. It is only on the home page and not on any other pages.
What I would like to do is have this animation run only the first time the page is accessed during a session. So if the user navigates to another page and then comes back to the home page, I don’t want the animation to run again.
The only solution I can think of is to create an HTML5 session storage object on the first page load that is checked every time the home page is loaded and use jquery to hide div that contains animation if the value of the object is set.
This seems a bit overkill for such a simple task. Any suggestions on a simpler way of just removing the div that is persistent across page reloads during the session? You don’t have to write the code for me, just point me in a simpler direction if possible. Like is there a way to do this with just CSS. Or if I remove the element using JavaScript will it remain removed after navigating to another page within site and then coming back to home page. Please and thanks!
P.S. This is a custom WordPress theme so I’m open to a PHP solution as well.
You can check the referrer URL and run the animation only if the referrer is not the site itself. But this time the animation won't be shown if the visitor first opens another page and then navigates to the homepage.
Another option would be using cookies.

Window like facebook chat

The Facebook chat window remains open, unchanged, to refresh the page, or even when we change page. How to reproduce something similar? Tried with frameset, but it did not work.
How to keep a div open a window similar to the internal, even after refreshing the page or clocar on a website link?
Like them, you can try -
The data is shared between facebook pages. Probably HTML5 localStorage? Cookies? I'm not sure.
If you notice, they don't "refresh" the page, they ajax-refresh the content on the page for subsequent loads. (unless you manually navigate to the same page, of course.)
Finally, its all CSS mainly some z-index put to use.
I hope those 3 are enough to get you started.
I don't think the whole page of Facebook is loaded. Every link has it's own 'target'. Most of them fetch a page (I think with simply AJAX) to show, others to just change some partials of the screen. So let's say, you have two divs. One div is the chat-div. Positioning fixed and all, z-index on 100, it will always stay on top. The rest of the page is the other div. Within this div, you can load certain pages with AJAX, without the whole screen to refresh.
As with reloads of the screen: you can easily save (also with AJAX) whether the user closed the chat screen or has it opened. Just create a table in a database called 'chats' or something, then when a chatscreen is opened you put an entry in that table with 'person_1', 'person_2' 'lastmessage' and 'active'. When they close the chat, you can put the 'active'-field to false. Then, whenever someone loads the entire website, you check the table chats for active chats, and shows them when there are any.
I would look into qjuery-qjax: https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax
From their docs:
pjax works by grabbing html from your server via ajax and replacing the content of a container on your page with the ajax'd html. It then updates the browser's current url using pushState without reloading your page's layout or any resources (js, css), giving the appearance of a fast, full page load. But really it's just ajax and pushState.

How can I get links to a redirect page to show up in the browser's history?

A website contains a "random" link, which loads a url that returns a 307 redirecting to the url we want. It works fine: click it and you load a random page. The problem is that each time you click it, the browser assumes you're loading the same page: so if you're on the homepage, then you follow the random link 5 times, then you press back, you'll be taken all the way back to the homepage, with no way to find the random pages you were just looking at. I want to modify this behavior so that users can access previous random pages via the back and forward buttons.
I don't own the website, so I can't just change the redirect code.
Here's what I've tried, all of which has failed.
Predicting what would be redirected to. While somewhat possible, there would be no way to avoid failure in up to .1% of clicks, and it would react very poorly to unexpected events, like a page that's published a day late, let alone a sit structure change.
Loading the 307 page via ajax. The request stops at readystate == 2 and I can't access the location header.
Cancel the click event and instead set location.href = random_link.href. This has no effect - the new page still doesn't go into history.
Have the new page call history.pushState. This successfully adds the page to history, but I can't find a way to distinguish between new pages and ones being opened via the back button, so the history quickly becomes very corrupted.
Keeping my own history in localStorage. As above, I can't tell when the back button is being used.
I'm working on a solution that I'm pretty sure will work, involving loading the page in an iframe over the existing page and using a background process and messaging to work around the fact that content injections from chrome extensions can't access window.parent from within iframes. And using the history API to reflect the current iframe's URL in the address bar, and get the back and forwards buttons to apply to the current iframe where appropriate.
While I'm pretty sure the last solution can be made to work, it's a hideously complex and heavyweight approach to what seems like a simple problem. So I thought I'd ask you guys before I continue: any other ideas?
Have you tried storing the locations in localStorage, then hi-jacking the back button ?
I am sure you know how localStorage works, for hi-jacking the back button you can refer to this : Is there a way to catch the back button event in javascript?
T.

Avoid iframe url affecting browser's back button

I have a web page where I have two iframes. I set the url (location) of the iframes in the page onload event. This is done to "delay load" the content. That is, the main page content is rendered first, then the iframe content with e.g. Like buttons, trust logos etc. are displayed. This speeds up the page rendering considerably.
However...
Clicking the back button first removes the trust logo. Then another back button click removes the Like buttons. The third click finally takes the user to the previous page.
Is there any way to avoid the URLs of the iframes to go into the browser history, while maintaining the above functionality?
Thanks!
Avoid using iFrames, if you really want to improve rendering like this, use AJAX. However there are numerous other problems if your page actually renders slow, how large is it, and how is it structured?

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