About this course
If you're a web developer who is using JavaScript to update the content of web pages dynamically, you could be breaking the web browser!
How? The "back" button is by far the most used navigational element in the browser. It gives people browsing the web the confidence to click on links as they know they can go back to where they were if they do something wrong. They expect it to always work.
By updating part of a web page using client-side script, the behaviour of this button can be broken. This can frustrate and annoy visitors to your website, which will make them leave!
The recent introduction of the HTML5 History API allows us to fix this - we can do partial page updates and tell the browser that the content has changed, thereby keeping the back button in full working order.
In this course you'll learn:
- How page navigation and the browser history work
- How we can break the back button by doing partial page updates
- How to fix it using the HTML5 History API
- How to overcome inconsistencies in the API by using the History dot js JavaScript library
- How to provide support for the history API in older, HTML4 browsers.
Throughout the course we'll be building a sample website that demonstrates all the techniques discussed in the lectures. Complete, working, fully-annotated source code is included.
What are the requirements?
- Basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript and jQuery is recommended.
- The small amounts of server-side code that are used in the examples are written in PHP, but are very simple and detailed knowledge of PHP is not required.
What am I going to get from this course?
- Over 10 lectures and 38 mins of content!
- In this course, you'll learn how the browser history and the back button work to allow page navigation.
- You'll learn how to do partial page updates, and in the process how this can break the back button. You'll also learn how to use the HTML5 History API to subsequently fix it.
- You'll learn how to use the History.js JavaScript library to overcome the shortcomings of the HTML5 History API, and also how to get the same functionality in legacy, HTML4 browsers.
What is the target audience?
- Any web developer who wants to avoid one of the biggest mistakes made when developing websites - breaking the back button.
- Anyone developing a website who wants to use client-side JavaScript to do partial page updates, but who doesn't want to break the behaviour of the back button.
- Web developers who want to know how to use the HTML5 History API. and the History.js JavaScript library.
