Develop Reference

how to launch a webpage on mobile web application without scroll

EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION:
What I want:
A full screen javascript canvas which can handle touch events without those events being further interpreted by the browser, but also reserve the ability to open a new window on user action.
Examples:
I should be able to swipe my finger around without the webpage trying to scroll
I should be able to swipe my finger around without the contents of the webpage being nudged in any way (normally, when one scrolls to the end of a scroll region, the browser allows some additional spring-loaded buffer scrolling to signal to the user that it is the end of the scroll region).
I should be able to pinch and pan without the webpage zooming
etc...
The point:
I need to interpret these events accurately and in realtime MYSELF to respond to these actions WITHIN THE CANVAS. (I am doing realtime drawing via requestAnimationFrame, allowing me to react to user events without using the DOM)
The state of things currently:
This all works perfectly (except for the ability to open a new window) because I position the canvas to be the full size of the viewport (handling any window resize events), and the canvas listens to ontouchstart, ontouchmove, ontouchend, etc... events, calling evt.preventDefault() after I have handled the user input myself. This works to ensure the canvas is ALWAYS full screen, doesn't budge, and user input is accurately given to me to handle in-game.
The Problem:
One bit of user input I need to handle is the launching of a webpage when they click the region of my canvas with a "launch my webpage" button. However, window.open(mywebpage) doesn't work, because mobile safari only allows such an action in the callstack of a click event. Because I rely on ontouchstart to get responsive controls, and evt.preventDefault() in an ontouchstart event CANCELS the click event from happening, I cannot launch the webpage (it gets blocked by the browser).
My attempted solutions, and why they are insufficient:
Just use a click event rather than ontouchstart: this means I can't prevent scrolling/etc... additionally, it is not as responsive, and doesn't allow me to handle touch-and-drag events well.
Overlay a div (or an a) tag atop the canvas over the launch webpage zone, and add a click event to that: if the user clicks-and-drags starting within this tag, then it allows the page to scroll and zoom. Trying to fix this results in the same problem as before.
ORIGINAL POST:
I have a mobile application that is a full-screen canvas, which locks itself positionally (can't scroll or zoom) so that I can correctly interpret user input uninterrupted (swipes, pans, etc...).
It locks itself in by intercepting touchstart events and calling evt.preventDefault (as well as the meta viewport no-zoom stuff which as far as I can tell doesn't actually do anything?).
This works great, and is absolutely necessary to make a game (or game-like application) function.
The problem is that I also have a "go to this webpage" button. I can intercept the touchstart, and use window.open(somewebpage), but mobile popup blockers will block it. The "rules" seem to be "the webpage will be allowed to be opened iff it is done in the call stack of a user interaction, AND that interaction is a 'click' event".
I have the first part down, but if I change the event to a click event, the web page now interprets swipes as scrolls (and pinches as zooms, etc...). If I have both a click and a touchstart event, then calling evt.preventDefault() on the touchstart (which stops the scroll/zoom) also stops the click event.
If I overlay a div atop the click zone of the "launch webpage" button, then the player can scroll/zoom when their input begins in that button, which results in an unpredictable and wonky experience.
How can I launch another webpage without allowing the current webpage to scroll?
Edit: at request, here is a code snippet at least partially illustrating what I'm trying to do https://jsfiddle.net/phildo/0q8e47fk/10/.
Note that in the "real" case, the canvas takes up the full width/height of the screen, and is explicitly set accordingly on screen resize.

Preventing bounces of any kind on mobile web page is a vast problem through out the mobile devices not depending about the manufacturer. I had similar issue on Windows Phone 8 app years ago and there (quite surprisingly) was a solution dedicated to Windows environment which of course cannot applied here.
For iOS you need an iOS solution, right?
The very solution is named iNoBounce. The idea is to add the little js library to your html page, code with some good conventions and the js lib will do the dirty job of preventing the default when necessary.
The trick it actually does is not to prevent just anything, but the ones only, that are "extra" and will cause the bounce events.
With the words of iNoBounce GitHub Readme:
iNoBounce detects if the browser supports -webkit-overflow-scrolling by checking for the property on a fresh CSSStyleDeclaration. If it does, iNoBounce will listen to touchmove and selectively preventDefault() on move events that don't occur on a child of an element with -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch set. In addition, iNoBounce will preventDefault() when the user is attemping to scroll past the bounds of a scrollable element, preventing rubberbanding on the element itself (an unavoidable caveat).
The example code asks you to use the following parts (there is a separate example code for canvas, this is only the most common solution):
// All you need is an element with `height` or `max-height`, `overflow: auto` and `-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch`.
<script src="inobounce.js"></script>
<style>
ul {
height: 115px;
border: 1px solid gray;
overflow: auto;
-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
}
</style>
Source:
[1] https://github.com/lazd/iNoBounce
Edit:
I found out you did not limit yourself to iOS. For other browsers, try
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/overscroll-behavior
which introduces overscroll-behavior setting, that you can set to none to disable bounces.
It will work only on Android, not ie or iOS.
For mobile Windows Phone I had the solution like this:
div.wp8ScrollFix {
-ms-touch-action: none;
}
which effectively does the same as iNoBounce, now with single CSS line for the div containing the canvas.
Edit2:
For a search of semi universal solution, I could find that
-touch-action: none;
applied to div element that includes the canvas, you can disable default touch events and for the canvas, define your own.
The solution works on any other than Safari browsers. As in [3] there may be some variants like
-ms-touch-action: none;
but I suppose they are now all same without prefixes. The [3] solution is very old and world has changed a lot from those days.
The sad thing is, the browser support is same at least 2019 [4] and maybe now also.
Sources:
[3] jQuery / HTML5 / gwt app for WP8 (Lumia 920) device: vertical css scroll fix
[4] https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/t/touch-action/

Problem
Show a div on top of full screen canvas element that intercepts normal click events on element canvas.
Solution
Aside from click events, you need to intrrcept the following touch events:
touchstart
touchend
touchmove
touchcancel
Additional Info
You only preventDefault on the canvas events so you should still be able to create a clickable/touchable element in the canvas that shows a div outside the canvas positioned with a z-index higher than the canvas element by setting on display: block on the div. The div should also have 100vh and 100vw set foe width and height respectively and be position: fixed. The div should also have a button to hide again display: none.
References
https://stackoverflow.com/a/51127296/806876

On a `ul`, Desktop vertical scroll works but mobile's touch scroll doesn't

I have one ul tag with max-height: 180px and overflow: auto styles.
This ul will have more li tags added dynamically (something like add li upon button click).
Issue: I can perfectly scroll list items if more li tags are added which doesn't fit in the max height of container. But, this is happening only in desktop. When I try same from my mobile chrome browser, it doesn't scroll.
Tried following, but no luck:
z-index, value is some 1000000 or above.
overflow: scroll, overflow-y: scroll, overflow: auto
overlapping by other elements, none
<body> tag had overflow: hidden, tried removing that, too
Question: What more should I debug? Couldn't find many solutions/documentations around this.
Sharing repro steps below, but, do not wish to get direct solution from your efforts. Only need some pointers to proceed.
Here is my test site with repro: https://interesting-my-store.myshopify.com/products/15mm-combo-wrench , open this page in mobile and click on red button with heart icon in it. A modal will pop up. Click "Create new collection" some 10 times and you will see that list won't scroll in mobile. But if you use desktop or use desktop debugger, it will scroll.

Found fix myself.
Issue was: Scroll was blocked with preventDefault() somewhere in my code.
Debugging: Found issue by adding "touchmove" event to my div container. Logged event data when I scrolled from my phone (via USB debugging on desktop). It showed me defaultPrevented: true. Thats where I realized preventDefault might be causing it. Looked for it in my code, and found that I had applied preventDefault on touchmove event at one place.
Removed that preventDefault and tried again and it worked.
Lesson learned:
If UI can be scrolled in desktop, it will be too in mobile unless blunder like above. No separate css or JS needed for scroll on mobiles.
If CSS is not giving away anything, go and look in JS too and don't ignore it thinking what JS has to do with touch screen.

Detecting doubletap on app top in mobile Safari via JavaScript

iOS has a convention that double-tapping on the top bar (i.e., where the current time is displayed) scrolls the app to the top state. For example, double-tapping the top bar in Safari brings you to the top of the current web page, and double-tapping the top in Facebook/Twitter brings you to the top of the feed. It's a very useful navigation shortcut.
Let's call it a TopTap for purposes of this question.
I'm wondering how I can detect TopTaps in a JavaScript app in mobile Safari -- that is, NOT in an iOS app, but in a web page that happens to be viewed in mobile Safari.
In my particular case, I can't rely on the built-in mobile Safari TopTap behavior because my document consists of a single <canvas> element that implements its own scrollable interface. I want to be able to detect a TopTap so that I can scroll that <canvas> to its top state.
I've experimented with adding an onscroll event handler, but there's no distinguishing information in that event that would let me isolate the TopTaps. Also, I can't use touch events (touchstart, etc.), because a TopTap happens in the browser/OS chrome, outside the scope of the web page.
Any ideas?

As it turns out double tapping the native status bar will trigger a scroll event on document.body which you can in fact listen for. Trick is, as you mentioned, how can you determine if it's from a double tap or not?
In order to detect it, the body has to be scrolled down to begin with. And setting the scroll position causes a scroll event.
While it's a bunch of hacks, I've been able to get this working:
Code: https://github.com/HenrikJoreteg/holy-grail-ios-layout
Demo: http://ios-layout.surge.sh
Basically, you don't really use the <body> as a container. You set it as position: absolute and full height/width. Then you have some kind of container element that you set to position: fixed that you use as your actual container for your content.
Doing this lets you programmatically scroll the body without affecting anything visual on the page at all.
Now you're set up to listen for scroll events on the body and ideally the user can't actually cause a scroll on the body except via double tapping the status bar.
Unfortunately you have to do all sorts of silly things to make this work.
Put something taller than 100% in the body so the body can actually has something to scroll.
Programmatically set the scroll position to 1 to start and after each status bar double tap.
Set a debounced scroll handler on the body that only fires if it knows the event wasn't caused by setting the position to 1.
As it turns out, iOS also likes to break thing when you rotate the phone, etc.
Use the following CSS to make the contents of your actual content containers scrollable with momentum and rubber-banding:
overflow-y: scroll; /* has to be scroll, not auto */
-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
Anyway, it's something :)
More info in the github repo, but anyway, this really does seem to work quite well for iOS 8 (haven't tested other versions of iOS).

If your target is recent iOS, you could put an element over your canvas that is position: fixed to the top of the viewport and use that to detect double-taps.
EDIT: I was thinking something like the below, but as Adrian points out he needs it to happen when the native browser chrome is double-tapped as well.
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
canvas {
height: 1000px;
width: 320px;
}
#top-tap {
height: 16px;
left: 0;
position: fixed;
right: 0;
top: 0;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<canvas></canvas>
<a id="top-tap"></a>
<script type="text/javascript">
function secondTap() {
window.scrollTo(0,0)
}
document.querySelector('#top-tap').addEventListener('touchend', function (e) {
var self = this
this.addEventListener('touchend', secondTap)
setTimeout(function () {
self.removeEventListner('touchend', secondTap)
}, 100)
})
</script>
</body>
</html>

Is it possible to create a hidden native html element, the same height as the content in your canvas. Then map the scroll position on the native element to the same position within the canvas. Could also hide the canvas scroll widget.
So as far as the users concerned they only see the native scroll bar... but all the scroll events map to the canvas - including the status bar tap.
May not work if you have other HTML content on the page but might if there's only the canvas visible.
Edit: Here's a very crude prototype http://jsbin.com/cisizopi/3
I'm simulating a canvas and it's contents with divs

After doing a little research, I came across this post: http://prud.github.io/ios-overflow-scroll-to-top/. I'm not sure if this will do what you are looking for. Also, I'm fairly certain that you cannot intercept the status bar touch with JS in the browser for IOS.

iframe on iOS (iPad) content cropping issue

I'm looking for the correct way to assure that dynamically revealed content is visible after scrolling in an iframe on ipad / iOS5.
Oh Iframes and iPad - what a wonderful old chesnut you are. I know that:
iPad expands iframes to the full height of the content within it (almost like it was using HTML5's "seamless" property, but not quite since it doesn't inherit styles or events from the parent). Bizarre, annoying to many, but true.
<iframe height="100%"> is therefore useless since it sizes to its content not to the container
I need to wrap my iframe in a div - a la
<div id="wrapper" style="-webkit-overflow-scrolling:touch;overflow:auto;">
<iframe width="100%" height="100%" src="about"blank"></iframe>
</div>
or else introduce some trickery to set the scroll position of the frame (which I think is based on tricks mentioned in this article)
My issue is that content that is dynamically shown inside the iframe body (e.g. jquery tabs, accordion, etc) may cause the browser to crop the content at the display extent of the page.
E.g. if my "tabs" are most of the way down the visible viewport inside the iframe and I perform a two-finger scroll (or implement the one finger scrollTop hack) then after that content is scrolled into view, some of its content that was previously not drawn remains undrawn. Clicking to a second tab / back again causes the content to appear as if the page doesn't draw off-screen content. After this, if I then scroll back up to the top of the page the content isn't drawn for the start of the page (which was previously visible). Scrolling the page up and down a few times with a two-finger scroll resolves the issue.
I had read this article that stated that the problem was fixed. But it doesn't seem to be fully fixed; and still doesn't get around the issue that because you have to wrap your iframe in a div and put scrollbars on that div, desktop browsers may show a double scrollbar depending on how they interpret overflow:auto.
p.s. I'm using HTML5 boilerplate page both inside and outside the iframe, with the correct meta viewport settings.

I found I was also able to solve the problem by making the document as tall as the iframe content. (As suggested Iframe Content Not Rendering Under Scroll In iOs5 iPad/iPhone) But in my case I didn't want the user to be able to scroll down in the now tall app, because its supposed to be a fullscreen application. I used this code to prevent vertical scrolling:
/*
Prevent Scrolling down.
*/
$(document).on("scroll",function(){
checkForScroll();
});
var checkForScroll = function(e)
{
var iScroll = $(document).scrollTop();
if (iScroll > 1){
// Disable event binding during animation
$(document).off("scroll");
// Animate page back to top
$("body,html").animate({"scrollTop":"0"},500,function(){
$(document).on("scroll",checkForScroll);
});
}
}
I evaluated a lot of options and wrote this blog post, including test code.
http://dev.magnolia-cms.com/blog/2012/05/strategies-for-the-iframe-on-the-ipad-problem/
Hope this helps,
Topher

I'm assuming there is a bug in iOS safari in how it treats iframes with defined width / height. Without width / height being defined it tries to scale them automatically to fit their content without any scrolling needed.
The best workaround I've found is to not scroll the iframe at all, but rather to scroll a wrapper div inside the framed-in page.
Here's an example:
<iframe id="stupid-iframe" width="600" height="200" src="a-file.html"></iframe>
a-file.html:
<html>
<body>
<div id="wrapper" style="width: 100%; height: 100%; overflow: auto; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;">
...all my normal content...
</div>
</body>
</html>

This is a very tedious problem, especially if you are in a scenario where you must use a dynamically scaling iframe, in my case with the YouTube iframe API. You are not able to control the scroll properties of the iframe. It doesn't even work if you modify the iframe elements in the ios simulator/safari debug window.
The best solution that I found was to use negative positioning to remove the excess whitespace. Android may have mixed results so you have to use browser detection and apply that way.

How do we disable - not hide - scrollbars in a browser using jQuery?

I would like to disable browser's scrolling when an event happens, but not remove the scrollbar ?
I would like something very similar to setting CSS's overflow:hidden to the whole document. My reason is that doing so changes the browser's width, hence I will have to re-align the body.

The best practise fix to the problem I think you're describing is this simple CSS:
html {
overflow-y: scroll
}
That forces the vertical scrollbar to always be visible, so that the browser's width will not change "when an event happens", and you won't "have to re-align the body".

Why not just set the entire web page to align:center? No manual re-aligning, and works with any screen resolution or browser :-)