I took "abusing the HTML5 History" to the next level. | Hacker News Reader

I took "abusing the HTML5 History" to the next level.

probablyinteractive.com

681 pointsprobablycorey62 comments

It's technically not using the HTML5 History, but that post inspired this idea.

Feels like we're back in the days of the Apple ][, only with a much, much smaller monitor. Things I'd like to see done in the URL bar using the History API:

  • Rogue-like text adventure game
  • Hitchhiker's Guide
  • A reading app with page-turning animation
  • Color

Whoever cracks that last one, mega kudos. Woz, you around? Feel like doing some magic?

It's also tempting to ask for a text-editor, but then, we sort of already have that!

Porting ed to the URL bar would be a triumph!

Just change it to read ? and most people wouldn't know the difference :-)

UrlQuake

Woz, you around?

That gave me a good laugh! If it is of any interest, in the following video which was posted a while back on HN, Steve Wozniak tells how he co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, and amongst other things, how he hackishly brought color computing to the Apple 2:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/400/

(You'll have to forgive me since I don't have time to search exactly where in the video he talks about adding color.)

I think i've heard that speech at four different conferences. Woz needs a new story.

I don't think Woz needs to prove anything to anybody.

Seriously. When you have a thought like that, first ask yourself, how often have you told the same story to 4 different people? Then ask yourself how many of your stories any casual acquantaince has heard 4 times.

Have you heard the one about the $2 bills?

I haven't.

It's about 15 minutes in that he starts talking about colour. I'm watching it now.

After playing for 10 minutes I thought "this is EXACTLY the kind of insane time-waster that I would like to read more content from..." So I tried to remove the # from the title bar as to navigate to your home page.

Turns out that that's harder than the actual game. I won in the end though.

On Safari, Cmd-click the title bar to get a hierarchal listing of the URL structure.

I was playing this on IE9. It took me 2 minutes to realize that there was a O and an a in the url bar somewhere. Damn you half width address bar!

At least it worked when I resized the address bar.

Around the launch of IE9 beta I asked Dean Hachamovitch (IE honcho at MSFT) what he thought about people typing random things (besides URLs) into the navigation bar. I'd noticed not entirely tech-savvy people in my life using the navigation bar as sort of a launch bar for their whole browsing experience, using it for new searches, history exploration, etc.

Hachamovitch reminded me that this was not really a new thing, as people have been using the command line since the dawn of time. Never did this really sink in until I saw this demo: The URL bar is a command line for the people. Behold its power.

Coding Horror: "The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line"

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/05/the-web-browser-add...

Aza Raskin (and about half of Humanized who had come with him) was working on getting this into Firefox. He worked on some other stuff and then left for another company, but you can get the idea from here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tut... and a very impressive video: http://vimeo.com/1561578

The architecture was pretty far along, completely extensible with new verbs and parsers in JS. They'd got rid of the ugly hyphens from that demo video with a better parser. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/0.2_Design:_UI_and_Se... They'd even solved most of the localization problems, like verb-subject-object or subject-verb-object, and pronouns, and stuff. I really would like to see this revisited sometime.

It's still being worked on by the community, there is a build from 2011-01-27.

https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/2010/03/10/community-mainta...

I still use and love this tool every day.

Entirely tech-savvy people use the navigation bar as sort of a launch bar for their whole browsing experience also. Chrome enables this fantastically.

My favourite is the domain tab completion automatic site search recognition thing. Chrome users know what I'm talking about. It's fantastic.

EDIT: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/tab-to-search

Basically I can type the first few characters of a domain until it autocompletes, then hit tab, then enter a search term which is submitted to that site's own search form, which chrome picked up when I went to the site, using various heuristics.

This is good, but not nearly as good as manually setting single character "keywords" for common searches.

use the search enough times and you can use single character+ <tab>

Works well until you want to distinguish between searching en.wikipedia.org and en.wiktionary.org.

(While writing this I realized I didn't actually remember the exact domain Wikipedia and Wiktionary used... so I ran a "test" search on both.)

http://yubnub.org could be used from address bar for some commands to be browser-independent (portable).

The Location Field is the new Command Line: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field

I look forward to dealing with this on shady sites that want to disable the back button.

Yup. It's kinda shocking that there doesn't appear to be some limit on the number of history entries you can push, in Firefox at least.

chrome as well. i imagine it will be dealt with.

and/or a rate limiter

This was possible without the advent of HTML5. One could always change the hash frag to your hearts content or use hidden iframes

Cool concept, just make sure you open it in a new window or you'll never make it back to HN!

It's actually not using HTML5 history like the links before. It's just doing hash manipulation.

It it used history.replaceState it could not only manipulate the URL completely but also it wouldn't make history events so the back button would work!

You don't need the HTML5 history API for that either.

    location.replace("#...");

I agree with you guys.

Took me a while to come back here to comment. :)

Very fun, very creative. Abuse is most definitely the correct word.

Thanks to your work my browser history in firefox have hundreds - if not thousands - of lines more just for your site.

Argh, you're right. I should've used private browsing for this. Fortunately on FF there's a "Clear Recent History" feature.

Alternatively you enter the base url into the search box and Ctrl+A Del (or Option+A, Del or C+a, del)

Wish I'd thought of this. And that I'd made it.

And that it doesn't catch on.

I like the game.

I also played with browser history to create something more useful http://bsearch.heroku.com/ i.e. access other search engines by clicking back button while on Google.

So now we can play games in both the address bar and the favicon: http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/

Well, after viewing my history from going to this page, I think that browsers are going to have to come up with a way to group history into collapsible groups. Most likely by a combination of tab and host.

Definitely not looking for to companies using the URL page as the new scrolling status bar...

Thanks for completely fucking up my browsing history. Kudos.

(Horrible hack though, how is that possible without the browser saying no?)

Ouch, my history! Seriously, this was an experience. I might go as far as calling it art.

That's pretty clever. I could see using location.hash for posting scrolling banner messages in the URL bar, ads ... all kinds of stuff that I'm really not looking forward to.

Is it possible in javascript to make a customisable auto-complete for the address bar? Similar to the way browsers use auto-complete based on your history, this would use auto-complete based on the site's hierarchy. It's different to this site because the input events (user controls) are not triggered when typing in the address bar.

For example, a user wanting to find the elephants page on this web site would be typing http://coolstuff.com/things/elep (and it would suggest) hants by having hants appear after elep as selected text.

Or is there a good reason why address bar events are not part of the dom?

30 seconds later, my laptop fan is full throttle. I think you win the watts-per-byte medal.

Fun bug: press escape tons and watch the animals move faster and your browser freeze.

<Khhaaannn!!!> My back button! MY HISTORY!!!! </Khhaaannn!!!>

similar to this via twitter: by @paulrouget

http://grack.com/blog/

I killed 4 in 23 seconds. Getting back to this post wasn't easy, though I can't say I wasn't warned!

One of the most creative things I've seen in a while. This wrinkles my brain and the best way.

What, no 8-bit sound effects?

"Look up at the url bar!"

I'm using Conkeror, so I had to look down.

Very creative. Actually a somewhat addicting game as well!

Does anyone else think this could be used as a captcha?

This game is even better on firefox with vimperator.

Wow, so much for back-nav'ing on that tab.

It seems to work in IE6 too.

probably interactive is in my history hundreds of times now :)

"Points 4"

No fun on the iPad :(

Nice idea.

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