AJAX links

[Nelson]

Our team website has had AJAX into the code, and I was wondering if I could get some people to try the links and give feedback on how fast they are and any problems they encounter. I am pretty our programmer worked out all of the bugs, but double checking would be nice.

Thank you.

[connor.worley]

Everything seems to work well except the the browser's back button.
I use reallysimplehistory to handle this when working with AJAX. It's really easy to use.

window.dhtmlHistory.create();

var pageChangeListener = function (newLocation, historyData) {
    if (newLocation == "") {
        // Not accessing an AJAX page
        newLocation= "index";
    }
    // Load the page elsewhere (i.e. your programmer will need to implement this)
    loadPage(newLocation);
}

window.onload = function () {
    dhtmlHistory.initialize();
    dhtmlHistory.addListener(pageChangeListener);
    pageChangeListener(window.location.hash.slice(1));
};

[colt527]

Hey,

You guys have a nice looking site! Also good job getting the AJAX links working. They all seem to work fine for me in Chrome. While AJAX links might make the content load faster and make for a more seamless browsing experience, there are a few downsides to this approach that make it generally discouraged.

#1 was already mentioned, which is it causes the browser back button to become non functional. As was posted, there are work arounds for this.

#2 is that it negatively affects search engine indexing. The google crawler does not know how to crawl AJAX links. One way around this is to use a technique called progressive enhancement. For example, have all your links be in the normal <a href="URL"> format, and then have javascript that goes and binds the necessary events for turning those into pages loaded over AJAX. This means that you still need to have those pages exist at a real URL location. If you are using a content management system, this is a pretty easy tasks to accomplish. This will still allow the search engine crawlers (which have no javascript interpreting) to crawl and index all of those pages.

Just a few things to keep in mind and to weight against the benefits. PM me if you would like any more information on how to implement these

[keehun]

Is AJAX really necessary? Really.

[Nelson]

It keeps the non robot programmer busy, and is cool.