This might sound like a duplicate, but I have searched through the forum questions and I haven't found what I was looking for.
So, I have been reading for a while now, and I still cannot decide what to do about the next situation. I'm building a one page website ( not my first ) which requires a smooth User Interface, so I have decide to load pages with AJAX for a better and more friendly navigation.
I have been using : SmartAjax ; for a while and it was good enough for me. It works nicely and I had no problems with it, but with it had problems handling a lot of JavaScript as callback. Also there was a lot of work to do when implementing it through the whole website.
And because now HTML5 is more stable than it was one year ago, and most of it's features are working in most of the browsers ( but some still require a polyfill ), I decided to start using HTML5 History API. A lot of websites use it and it's very easy to do so, but there some aspects I don't understand about it.
Therefore here's what I would like to know about it :
is it supported by all browsers by now, and most important, will touch devices and mobiles support it ?
is there a special library or a framework for it ?
is it safe to use for small websites ( a maximum of 6 pages ) but with a lot of JavaScript ?
does it behave when using it in combination with jQuery Plugins ?
what about hashbang and hashes ? aren't they the same as using History API ? and what are the differences ?
I would appreciate all the help and info I get about the points stated above.
Browser support
Forget it. Not even IE 9 supports history.pushState. Mobile browsers not very safe either. But there is a library (see below) that makes this incompatibility completely transparent to the developer.
Library
Well, in pure HTML 5 environments, the history api is pretty straightforward. For others, the history.js library has gotten quite some attention, plus it offers an automated fallback to the old hash-writing
On Small Websites
Well, you better have your JavaScript and your potential States organised, then. But if so, I see no problem.
History & jQuery & plugins
I have used the two together in a couple of projects now. I have not yet found any problem with using jQuery and jQuery Plugins, except for - of course - the typical issues associated with Injected HTML (i.e. event handlers must be rebound; $(document).ready() might or might not work in some environments, etc).
Hashes vs. history.pushState
The Hash-Notation has been used as a workaround (or nowadays, fallback). It becomes unnecessary when using history.pushState.
What I have found to be the major difference is, that the URL in the address bar is always directly understandable by the server, especially for bookmarking or link-sharing purposes. If you had http://example.org/#/my/fancy/site, then your index page would have to parse the hash (via javascript, as you can't access the hash server-side), and then inject/redirect to my/fancy/site.
However, if using using history.pushState, the Browser's address bar shows http://example.org/my/fancy/site - which is directly routable.
(and, imagine spelling out a hash, or hash-bang URL to someone via phone!)
Hope that clarifies some or your doubts with history! I can strongly recommend History.js as library a of choice.
I would prefer to use HTML5 History for browsers which support it (all current browsers and upcoming IE10), and use just static (non-Ajax) links for older ones. As browsers are updated, your site gets better automatically.
I wouldn't recommend using hash polyfills due to serious disadvantages of hashes (e.g. pointless referers that don't include hash part of URL, thus making stats rather useless).
Related
tldr; Can one get the browser version from the front end without using navigator strings or Client Hints?
So with Google's announcement about freezing the navigator.userAgent string, I've been tasked with going through a bunch of javascript libraries at work in an effort to replace browser sniffing (aka userAgent). I know, I know, we shouldn't use userAgent in the first place because it's a sack of confusion and lies, but I'm inheriting this code and not creating it. Luckily, a bunch of the use cases were dated (IE8-10, PhantomJS, Windows Phone) and I could remove them completely. Others I could figure out which features/intentions the original authors were using and I could swap their conditions for feature detection.
But some of the public facing logic is using navigator.userAgent to figure out the browser version and this has been more challenging to replace because everything I find on the interwebs related to this search points to using one of the navigator properties. I don't know how and why clients care which "version of Firefox a user is on" and I'm awaiting that answer, but in the meantime I'm trying to see if there is a solution out there that can detect browser version on the front end. I'm not restricting the answer to just javascript, if there is a CSS/HTML/JS combination, I'm all for it.
I'm also aware the Google says we should use Client Hints but that requires hitting the server which is out of scope for my task.
Freezing plan via the Google Announcement:
Different parts of the UA string have different compatibility
implications.
Some parts of it, such as the browser version and the OS version, can
be frozen without any backwards compatibility implications. Values
that worked in the past will continue to work in the future.
Other parts, such as the model (for mobile devices) and the OS
platform, can have implications on sites that tailor their UI to the
underlying OS or that target a very specific model in their layout. Such sites will need to migrate to use UA-CH.
If I am reading the second bullet here correctly, then the version parts of the navigator strings will be frozen and unreliable by Early June 2020.
Again, just so it's clear, I know this should be replace by feature detection, but I don't have full control over our clients and users and I'm just seeing if there is a solution out there. I have a feeling lots of folks will end up trying to solve this problem soon enough.
Currently I am using $.browser.webkit and $.browser.msie because the input types between the browsers have plenty of unique UI differences that I am having to accommodate for.
Specifically: Chrome changes my range to a slider, IE doesn't; and I have to place a spinner on the IE time type, Chrome covers that. There are others, but these are the ones that I have to deal with the most.
What is the preferred way to test for these differences rather than using the migrate lib's browser test?
(I know I could query the useragent directly, but I would rather query the UI to see if I need to add a spinner, or slider, etc.)
Short answer, mplungjan had an answer that was close but not what I needed. If you look at IE11 vs Chrome where both have a feature that is supported, you may see where they render the support completely differently. So my solution ended up being stay with the migrate lib to detect browser and version, then have my code override the render on browsers that need it.
This means that I will be keeping a dictionary of browsers and implemented features, so my code can intelligently override as dictionary dictates.
As for the case where a feature isn't supported, I will just continue to use the standard test for feature, that has worked and mplungjan has linked to one of the easiest ways to test. Not the best, but the easiest.
Switching to Twitter Bootstrap and Angular.JS UI has reduced some of this oddness, by using other peoples solutions.
I'm using the history.js plugin (https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/) to give elements on a page a certain unique url when opened.
As expected, this works great in HTML5 browsers, but the plugin isn't quite doing what I need in HTML4 browsers (Internet Explorer, in other words).
Basically, I'm having the same pitfall that is outlined in the documentation for the plugin, as seen here:
These issues are unavoidable if hashes are used.
URLs get polluted if we did not start on the home page
http://www.facebook.com/balupton#!/balupton?sk=info
http://mywebsite.com/page1#/page2
Although, my URLs are not quite as bad as this, other than the hash being thrown in, the url is usable. Removing the suid at the end would also be nice, as it isn't necessary in my case, but it should be fine if that's not possible.
Here is what my URL needs to look like:
http://domain.com/sitename/main/item/109
And this is the result in IE:
http://domain.com/sitename/#main/idea/109?&_suid=13812466306670658...
As far as I could gather from the documentation was that my only option would be to disable the HTML4 fallback, which means that nothing will happen in IE.
I'm wondering if theres a way to just forgo the HTML4 fallback options, but still use the HTML5 solution in it's place (to change the url in the same way it does, just with a different method.. I know that the method used for the HTML5 solution won't work). Or, if there's any other way to alter the way that the HTML4 solution is implemented, to bend it to the needs of this project?
UPDATE: In my own research, I am seeming to find that it is impossible to alter an HTML4 compliant browser's url without using a hash. I'm currently in the process of integrating some workarounds into my project so that our URLs use hashes. I'm still leaving this question open as this isn't really an answer, and I don't even know if I am 100% right.
If it's still needed, the partial answer to cleaner URL for you would be solution below.
Try code below regarding to https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/
History.options.disableSuid
Force History not to append suid
I'd like to use autofocus="autofocus" in my code, but since some browsers don't support this yet, I was thinking of adding some JS code, which would search for an element with such a tag, and focus it with JS. But since this seems to be a common requirement, I wonder if there are any ready libraries, which can take care of at least some HTML5 annoyances with older browsers?
I believe the correct answer would be not quite. Modernizr 2.0 (including html5shim) gives us semantic elements of html5 (actually the html5shim does that) and great feature detection which you can use for graceful js fallback.
In you case It would be using jQuery .focus() with something like:
if (!Modernizr.autofocus){
$('input[autofocus=""]').focus();
}
more examples here
If older browsers don't support certain advanced features, then I would say follow progressive enhancement and don't worry about it. So long as the core functionality of your site—ordering products, or whatever—works across the board, then don't be afraid to add in shiny html5 features for the benefit of your users with good browsers.
Putting in clunky/third-party code to force IE6 and 7 to behave in a civilized manner will potentially be a lot of work for you, will be prone to bugs, and won't even give you too much of a payoff since the folks using IE6 probably won't be looking over the shoulders of Chrome users to see a nicer version of your site there.
Here are the slides (from a jQuery conference) that really drove this home for me.
The role of Modernizr (previously mentioned) is to do feature detection, to determine what HTML 5 features are available. Modernizr doesn't automatically make unavailable HTML 5 features available, but it does make it possible for you to conditionally load scripts (commonly referred to as polyfills) to add those features. In the case of autofocus, the html5support library should provide what you need, and you can use Modernizr's conditional loading to only load it if needed.
Users of libraries like jQuery say that they implement such a features.
I don’t recommend it anyway, try to code the minimum functions you need by yourself.
Take also a look at http://www.modernizr.com/.
I'm not a JavaScript wiz, but is it possible to create a single embeddable JavaScript file that makes all browsers standards compliant? Like a collection of all known JavaScript hacks that force each browser to interpret the code properly?
For example, IE6 does not recognize the :hover pseudo-class in CSS for anything except links, but there exists a JavaScript file that finds all references to :hover and applies a hack that forces IE6 to do it right, allowing me to use the hover command as I should.
There is an unbelievable amount of time (and thus money) that every webmaster has to spend on learning all these hacks. Imagine if there was an open source project where all one has to do is add one line to the header embedding the code and then they'd be free to code their site per accepted web standards (XHTML Strict, CSS3).
Plus, this would give an incentive for web browsers to follow the standards or be stuck with a slower browser due to all the JavaScript code being executed.
So, is this possible?
Plus, this would give an incentive for web browsers to follow the standards or be stuck with a slower browser due to all the JavaScript code being executed.
Well... That's kind of the issue. Not every incompatibility can be smoothed out using JS tricks, and others will become too slow to be usable, or retain subtle incompatibilities. A classic example are the many scripts to fake support for translucency in PNG files on IE6: they worked for simple situations, but fell apart or became prohibitively slow for pages that used such images creatively and extensively.
There's no free lunch.
Others have pointed out specific situations where you can use a script to fake features that aren't supported, or a library to abstract away differences. My advice is to approach this problem piecemeal: write your code for a decent browser, restricting yourself as much as possible to the common set of supported functionality for critical features. Then bring in the hacks to patch up the browsers that fail, allowing yourself to drop functionality or degrade gracefully when possible on older / lesser browsers.
Don't expect it to be too easy. If it was that simple, you wouldn't be getting paid for it... ;-)
Check out jQuery it does a good job of standardizing browser javascript
Along those same lines explorercanvas brings support for the HTML5 canvas tag to IE browsers.
You can't get full standards compliance, but you can use a framework that smooths over some of the worst breaches. You can also use something called a reset style sheet.
There's a library for IE to make it act more like a standards-compliant browser: Dean Edwards' IE7.
Like a collection of all known
javascript hacks that force each
browser to interpret the code properly
You have two choices: read browser compatibility tables and learn each exception a browser has and create one yourself, or use avaiable libraries.
If you want a javascript correction abstraction, you can use jQuery.
If you want a css correction abstraction, you can check /IE7/.
I usually don't like to use css corrections made by javascript. It's another complexity to my code, another library that can insert bugs to already bugged browsers. I prefer creating conditional statements to ie6, ie7 and such and create separate stylesheets for each of them. This approach works and doesn't generate a lot of overhead.
EDIT: (I know that we have problems in other browsers, but since IE is the major browser out there and usually we need really strange hacks to make it work, css conditional statements is a good approach IMO).
Actually you can,there are lots of libraries to handle this issue. From the start of the time, javascript compliance issue always was a problem for developers and thanks to innovative ones who developed libraries to get over this problem...
One of them and my favorite is JQuery.
Before JavaScript 1.4 there was no global arguments Array, and it is impossible to implement the arguments array yourself without a highly advanced source filter. This means it is going to be impossible for the language to maintain backwards-compatibility with Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0. So right out I can say that no, you cannot make all browser standards compliant.
Post-netscape, you can implement nearly all of the features in the core of the language in JavaScript itself. For example, I coded all methods of the Array object in 100% JavaScript code.
http://openjsan.org/doc/j/jh/jhuni/StandardLibrary/1.81/index.html
You can see my implementation of Array here if you go to the link and then go down to Array and then "source."
What most of you are probably referring to is implementing the DOM objects yourself, which is much more problematic. Using VML you can implement the Canvas tag across all the modern browsers, however, you will get a buggy/barely-working performance in Internet Explorer because VML is markup which is not a good format for implementing the Canvas tag...
http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/
Flash/Silverlight: Using either of these you can implement the Canvas tag and it will work quite well, you can also implement sound. However, if the user doesn't have any browser plugins there is nothing you can do.
http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
DOM Abstractions: On the issue of the DOM, you can abstract away from the DOM by implementing your own Event object such as in the case of QEvent, or even implementing your own Node object like in the case of YAHOO.util.Element, however, these usually have some subtle changes to the standard API, so people are usually just abstracting away from the standard, and there is hundreds of cases of libraries that abstract away.
http://code.google.com/p/qevent/
This is probably the best answer to your question. It makes browsers as standards-compliant as possible.
http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2007/03/yet-another/