Of urls and single url DHTML sites.

Dynamic sites, and urls.

A website I am working on now, pretendpaper.com is one of those single url sites with lots of fancy DHTML where everything changes dynamically without changing urls. Everything is loaded with a python twisted, wsgi server sending xmlrpc into separate tabs.

A while ago I implemented a scheme which works with javascript to inspect the url, and open up different tabs. For example, this link opens up a review and an article into different tabs http://www.pretendpaper.com/?r=5&a=4

Putting in a site url box.

Now, to make people be able to share links of what they are looking at in the site, we are going to place a url box in there. So as they open up different bits of the site they can see a link for where they are. It will be like a browser inside of a browser. With a url bar, and tabs.


Saving the whole state of website as a url.

Now I am working on encoding the whole state of the page into a url. Including the scroll state of the bars in the tabs, and which tabs are focused. Then, periodically as a person visits the site it will save this state into a cookie. Then next time they visit the site they will be redirected to the saved state of the website as a url.

This gives many advantages. Especially once search is implemented. They will be able to arrive at the site, and have thier searches from last time appearing in the tabs. So if they searched for say noise gigs, and poetry readings in their suburb last time the same search tabs will appear with all the latest noise gigs, and poetry readings in their suburb.

Of course, this means that I need to finish off the UI for search...

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