Question

My designer thought it was a good idea to create a transition between different pages. Essentially only the content part will reload (header and footer stay intact), and only the content div should have a transitional effect (fade or some sort). To create this sort of effect isn’t really the problem, to make google (analytics) happy is…

Solutions I didn’t like and why;

• Load only the content div with ajax: google won’t see any content, meaning the site will never be found, or only the parts which are retrieved by ajax, which arent’t full pages at all
• show the transitional effect, then after that ‘redirect’ the user to the designated page (capture the click event of a elements): effect is pretty much the same as just linking to another page, eg. user will still see a page being reloaded

I thought of one possible solution:
When a visitor clicks a link, capture the event, load the target with ajax, show the transitional effect in the meantime, then just rewrite the entire document with the content fetched with the ajax request.

At least this will work and has some advantages; the page reload will look seamless, no matter how slow your internet connection is, google won’t really mind because the ajax content is a full html page itself, and can be crawled as is, even non-javascript browsers (mobile phones et al.) won’t mind, they just reload the page.

My hesitation to implement this method is that i would reload an entire page using ajax. I’m wondering if this is what ajax is meant to do, if it would slow things down. Most of all, is there a better solution, eg. my first ‘bad’ solution but slightly different so google would like it (analytics too)?

Thanks for your thoughts on this!

Answer 1

Short answer: I would not recommend loading an entire page in this manner.

Long answer: Not recommended. whilst possible, this is not really the intent of XHR/Ajax. Essentially what you’re doing is replicating the native behaviour of the browser. Some of the problems you’ll encounter:

1. Support for the Back/Forward
   button. You’ll need a URI # scheme
   to solve.
2. The Browser must parse
   the entire page through AJAX.
   This’ll slow things down. E.g. if
   you load a block of HTML into the
   browser, then replace the DOM with
   it, only then will any scripts, CSS
   or images contained therein begin
   downloading.
3. Memory – the
   browser’s not changing pages. Over
   time (depending on the browser), I’d
   expect the memory usage to increase.
4. Accessibility. Screen readers
   will need to be notified whenever
   the page content is updated. Might
   not be a concern for you but worth
   mentioning.
5. Caching. Browser
   would not know which page to cache
   (beyond the initial load).
6. Separation of concerns – your View
   is essentially broken into
   server-side pieces to render the
   page’s content along with the static
   HTML for the page framework and
   lastly the JS to combined the server
   piece with the browser piece.
   This’ll make maintenance over time
   problematic and complex.
7. Integration with other components –
   you’re already seeing problems with
   Google Analytics. You may encounter
   issues with other components related
   to the timing of when the DOM is
   constructed.

Whether it’s worth it for the page transition effect is your call but I hope I’ve answered your question.