So now that HTML5 introduces history.pushState to change the browsers history, websites start using this in combination with Ajax instead of changing the fragment identifier of the URL.
Sadly that means that those calls cannot be detect anymore by onhashchange .
My question is: Is there a reliable way (hack? ;)) to detect when a website uses history.pushState ? The specification does not state anything about events that are raised (at least I couldn't find anything).
I tried to create a facade and replaced window.history with my own JavaScript object, but it didn't have any effect at all.
Further explanation: I'm developing a Firefox add-on that needs to detect these changes and act accordingly.
I know there was a similar question a few days ago that asked whether listening to some DOM events would be efficient but I would rather not rely on that because these events can be generated for a lot of different reasons.
Update:
Here is a jsfiddle (use Firefox 4 or Chrome 8) that shows that onpopstate is not triggered when pushState is called (or am I doing something wrong? Feel free to improve it!).
Update 2:
Another (side) problem is that window.location is not updated when using pushState (but I read about this already here on SO I think).
Source: Tips4all
5.5.9.1 Event definitions
ReplyDeleteThe popstate event is fired in certain cases when navigating to a session history entry.
According to this, there is no reason for popstate to be fired when you use pushState. But an event such as pushstate would come in handy. Because history is a host object, you should be careful with it, but Firefox seems to be nice in this case. This code works just fine:
(function(history){
var pushState = history.pushState;
history.pushState = function(state) {
if (typeof history.onpushstate == "function") {
history.onpushstate({state: state});
}
// ... whatever else you want to do
// maybe call onhashchange e.handler
return pushState.apply(history, arguments);
}
})(window.history);
Your jsfiddle becomes:
window.onpopstate = history.onpushstate = function(e) { ... }
Note: of course you can add onpushstate simply to the global object, and you can even make it handle more events via add/removeListener
You could bind to the window.onpopstate event?
ReplyDeletehttps://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM%3awindow.onpopstate
From the docs:
An event handler for the popstate
event on the window.
A popstate event is dispatched to the
window every time the active history
entry changes. If the history entry
being activated was created by a call
to history.pushState() or was affected
by a call to history.replaceState(),
the popstate event's state property
contains a copy of the history entry's
state object.