[whatwg] <a onlyreplace>

[Jonas Sicking]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Dion Almaer <dion at almaer.com> wrote:
> This feels like really nice sugar, but maybe the first step should be to get
> the shim out that gets it working using JS now.... and then see how it works
> in practice. I totally understand why this looks exciting, but I have the
> same uneasiness as Jonas.  It feels like a LOT of magic to go grab a page
> and grab out the id and ..... and I am sure there are edges. Cool idea for
> sure! It also feels like this should work nicely with the history/state work
> that already exists.

Yeah, I think this puts the finger on my uneasiness nicely. There's
simply a lot of stuff going on with very little control for the
author. I'd love to see a JS library developed on top of
pushState/XMLHttpRequest that implements this functionality, and then
see that JS library deployed on websites, and see what the experiences
from that are.

If it turns out that this works well then that would be a strong case
for adding this to browsers natively.

In fact, you don't even need to use pushState. For now this can be
faked using onhashchange and fragment identifier tricks. It's
certainly not as elegant as pushState (that is, after all, why
pushState was added), but it's something that can be tried today.

/ Jonas