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

probablycorey · 2011-03-08T17:47:50.000Z

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!

shimonamit 15 years ago | |

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.)

Tyr42 15 years ago | | |

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

peterwwillis 15 years ago | | |

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

dreamux 15 years ago | | |

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

dasil003 15 years ago | | |

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.

oofabz 15 years ago | | |

Have you heard the one about the $2 bills?

HelloBeautiful 15 years ago | | |

I haven't.

probablycorey 15 years ago | |

Porting ed to the URL bar would be a triumph!

sp332 15 years ago | | |

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

templaedhel 15 years ago | | |

UrlQuake

mrspeaker 15 years ago |

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.

spicyj 15 years ago | |

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

barista 15 years ago | | |

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.

taylorbuley 15 years ago |

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.

sp332 15 years ago | |

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.

msg 15 years ago | | |

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.

nzjames 15 years ago | |

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

JonnieCache 15 years ago | | |

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.

nialo 15 years ago | | |

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

sathyabhat 15 years ago | | |

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

jarek 15 years ago | | |

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.)

jmaygarden 15 years ago | |

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

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

statictype 15 years ago | |

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

d0mine 15 years ago | |

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

pkulak 15 years ago |

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

immad 15 years ago | |

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

forgotusername 15 years ago | |

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.

catshirt 15 years ago | | |

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

tesseract 15 years ago | | |

and/or a rate limiter

ry0ohki 15 years ago |

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

paulirish 15 years ago | |

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!

Sephr 15 years ago | | |

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

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

Dell 15 years ago | | |

I agree with you guys.

slashcom 15 years ago |

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

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

itsnotvalid 15 years ago |

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

hrabago 15 years ago | |

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

itsnotvalid 15 years ago | | |

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

v21 15 years ago |

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

And that it doesn't catch on.

amitvjtimub 15 years ago |

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.

TorKlingberg 15 years ago |

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

itcmcgrath 15 years ago |

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...

flexd 15 years ago |

Thanks for completely fucking up my browsing history. Kudos.

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

bryze 15 years ago |

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

thaumaturgy 15 years ago |

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.

mekazu 15 years ago |

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?

ibejoeb 15 years ago |

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

cobbal 15 years ago |

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

noonespecial 15 years ago |

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

fady 15 years ago |

similar to this via twitter: by @paulrouget

http://grack.com/blog/

timinman 15 years ago |

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

ddinch 15 years ago |

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

measure2xcut1x 15 years ago |

What, no 8-bit sound effects?

angus77 15 years ago |

"Look up at the url bar!"

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

retroafroman 15 years ago |

Very creative. Actually a somewhat addicting game as well!