Monday, November 13th, 2006
Experimental Odeo Interface
Category: Showcase
Evan Williams talked about how Ajax interfaces do not have to give up permalinks.
We have seen many examples, and Even uses an an experimental new interface to his Odeo as an example itself.
4.3 rating from 8 votes
Unfortunately… no Safari support… looks like it really can’t be done…
What is the news here?
Brad Neuberg’s Really Simple History library did all this more than a year ago - and it supported the back button too. It didn’t support Safari either (sorry, Tobie!), but I think other people have figured out how to support Safari since then.
Hi Michael; thanks for the shout out on RSH.
Some clever hackers have figured out how to get back/forward button support on Safari, but no one to my knowledge has also figured out how to update the URL for a permalink using an anchor hask.
Best,
Brad
Ah, I remembered the Safari reference. Klaus Hartl has written a jQuery plugin that does the whole thing, Safari included. Here’s his demo page and source code.
Hi Michael, thanks for the link!
Looks like it is working in Safari (a bit shaky though…)!
All I need know is a Prototype port… ;-)
I’ll look into that as soon as possible.
Great stuff.
Thanks again.
Hi Tobie and Michael, I checked out that test page on Safari and it doesn’t work consistently. The problem isn’t that you can’t sometimes get it to work in Safari; the problem is that its very inconsistent and buggy. Safari just doesn’t give you the basic machinery.
Nice and clean implementation. This kind of thing should be something you just do, not an extra.
Check out SWFAddress it’s a state/history script which allows Flash applications to support permalinks, reloads and back/forward. And it works in Safari.
Tobie, just switch to jQuery :)
Gilles: I nearly did a while back, but decided against it in the end.
There are some things I like about jQuery, but overall, it does not have the power and richness of Prototype (IMO).
Yeah, Brad, Safari is a tough customer, isn’t it?
I did notice the problem on Klaus’s test page where the chapter text would appear and then disappear sometimes, but I wasn’t sure if that had to do with the history/hash or if it was some unrelated glitch.
“What is the news here?”
I think it’s newsworthy that a well-known site is using it. Not that it’s the only one - MS Live Image Search also uses it.
The “Unique URL” technique was used with Flash sites as far back as 2001 - http://www.robertpenner.com/experiments/backbutton/backbutton.html.