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Asked: 2026-06-08T20:52:59+00:00

My goal is to support AJAX history for HTML5 browsers only. However, I would

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My goal is to support AJAX history for HTML5 browsers only. However, I would like my site to work with HTML4 browsers, but without AJAX history.

Many of the History.js examples include the following check before performing any operations:

if (!History.enabled) {
    // History.js is disabled for this browser.
    // This is because we can optionally choose to support HTML4 browsers or not.
    return false;
}

This would seem to work except for the fact that older browser such as IE7 do not support native JSON and the History.js plugin requires JSON.parse and JSON.stringify.

The suggested solution is to include json2.js (link). This seems kind of strange to me since HTML5 browsers that support pushState() and popState() should also support native JSON. Also, I do not want to include yet another library that I do not really need. My solution is to conditionally include History.js as follows:

var nativeJSON = (typeof JSON === 'object') && (typeof JSON.parse === 'function') && (typeof JSON.stringify === 'function');
if (nativeJSON) {
    /// Include contents of: balupton-history.js-e84ad00\scripts\bundled\html5\jquery.history.js
} else {
    window.History = { enabled: false };
}

This seems to work, but feels like a hack. Is there a better way to do this?

EDIT: 7/31/2012

If I do not include history.html4.js it still gives me an error on IE7. It appears that including json2.js is simply a requirement of this plugin at the moment. An improvement could probably be made to silently check for JSON support and disable the plugin if there is none, but for now I have a workaround. Here is a snippit from History.js:

/**
 * History.js Core
 * @author Benjamin Arthur Lupton <contact@balupton.com>
 * @copyright 2010-2011 Benjamin Arthur Lupton <contact@balupton.com>
 * @license New BSD License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BSD/>
 */

(function(window,undefined){
    "use strict";

    // ========================================================================
    // Initialise

    // Localise Globals
    var
        console = window.console||undefined, // Prevent a JSLint complain
        document = window.document, // Make sure we are using the correct document
        navigator = window.navigator, // Make sure we are using the correct navigator
        sessionStorage = window.sessionStorage||false, // sessionStorage
        setTimeout = window.setTimeout,
        clearTimeout = window.clearTimeout,
        setInterval = window.setInterval,
        clearInterval = window.clearInterval,
        JSON = window.JSON,
        alert = window.alert,
        History = window.History = window.History||{}, // Public History Object
        history = window.history; // Old History Object

    // MooTools Compatibility
    JSON.stringify = JSON.stringify||JSON.encode;
    JSON.parse = JSON.parse||JSON.decode;

If window.JSON is undefined, referencing window.JSON.stringify will simply cause an error.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Here is how I solved it for my case. I wanted to use public CDNs when possible and combine all other JS code for my site into a single include file. Here is what the code looks like.

    Page.html

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
    <title>Page Title</title>

    <!-- JS Files Hosted on CDN(s) -->
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"></script>

    <!-- Combined Custom JS File -->
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/site.js"></script>

</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

    The single JS include file combines all needed plugins and any custom code needed to run the site.

    Site.js

    // History.js plugin
var nativeJSON = (typeof JSON === 'object') && (typeof JSON.parse === 'function') && (typeof JSON.stringify === 'function');
if (nativeJSON) {
    // contents of browserstate-history.js-e84ad00\scripts\bundled\html5\jquery.history.js
} else {
    window.History = { enabled: false };
}

/*
Watermark v3.1.3 (March 22, 2011) plugin for jQuery
http://jquery-watermark.googlecode.com/
Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Todd Northrop
http://www.speednet.biz/
Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses.
*/
// contents of jquery.watermark.min.js


// INCLUDE more plugins here


// Custom JS Code here

    Chances are I will want to send down at least some custom JS code and this allows me to send it all in 1 payload. From what I understand it is good practice to combine resource files.

    EDIT: 2013-06-25

    In subsequent projects I have simply included a minified version of json2.js into my combined JS file. Using Google’s Closure Compiler you can get it down to about 3K (before HTTP compression) which seems acceptable.

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