'#' In Urls?

[MrFish]

I like to include ajax in my site whenever possible. This has its benefits but I've realized a major problem it causes. If you include a variety of pages into one page, you disable the back button and the back button is one of the most used features of the browser. I've seen some sites using the pound symbol (#) to automatically move to anchor points, can it be used for javascript and php?

Edited October 12, 2009 by MrFish

[chibineku]

The # symbol is used in links to refer to an element with a specific id. For example:<a href="#main">main</a>Will take you to,<div id="main"> ... </div>I don't know about implementing it with plain JavaScript or PHP, but you can easily use jQuery to import only specific elements by referencing their ids (or classes, actually). For example, to load the main div from one page and import it into the main div in the current page when you click on a button, you could do:

$(document).ready(function() {$('#id_of_button').click(function() {$('#main_div_of_local_document').load('filename.html #main_div_of_remove_document');return false; //this line only if you use an anchor to start things off, to stop the link going anywhere});});

The thing about this is it will end up with two divs with id 'main'. You would probably change the selector for the load function to #main #content, or some other wrapper for the content in the main id.

[Synook]

You can access and set the hash part of the URL through the window.location.hash property.

[MrFish]

chibineku:Yes but that is irrelevant to the pound symbol in a url. At least I believe so.Synook:Ok, thanks. I'll look into it.

[Synook]

Note - in this case it is the "hash" symbol, and yes, going to page#someid will cause the browser to scroll to the element with id="someid" (however changing it after the page loads won't cause a jump). By the way, you can also artificially insert entries into the browser's history.

Edited October 13, 2009 by Synook