The Official Xanjax Blog

Xanjax Known Issues

April 6th, 2008 by chappo, in Broken Stuff

Naturally there are some issues, especially so early in the release cycle!

If you find more, please add comments with details.

Opera is not supported yet supported as of 20080410 with addition of cancel bubble code.

Konqueror is not supported yet.

Safari in not tested at all yet and may or may not work.

Classes in IE. This one I hadn’t noticed during development. CSS classes don’t work in any version of Internet Explorer. This is actually due to a well known bug in IE with setAttribute. Ugly hack for know is to use object loads for any page needing classes. I hope we can get around this one!

Navigation Bug in IE. This is minor. If you navigate all the way back out of Xanjax, back in and all the way forward out again, then back in again, the last page will be correct but location bar reads entry page rather than the exit page.

Navigation Bug. When entering a new hash location while in Xanjax location bar stays on this hash until navigating out of Xanjax and back in again. Navigation still works. This is caused by browser behaviour and may not be fixable. It’s not that common for people to type into the address bar after having arrived at a site, so this is not considered to be all that serious.

Navigation Bug. Presently, typing a hash while in Xanjax will not work unless the hash is already known, such as in the menu or the content being viewed. This is because a dynamic algorithm is being used to create anchors. I’ll probably revert to static, or better to a combination if people think this matters. Please note that all inward links using either an ordinary *.html path or a #hash path work.

Query Strings.  Presently, query strings are not working in internal pages, but work fine from external inward links. This is due due an oversight in the hash creation algorithm and will be fixed.

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Xanjax Wish List

March 22nd, 2008 by chappo, in Wish List

Please put feature requests for Xanjax here so they won’t be lost in the day to day chat noise.

Most of the wish list will probably be read and forgotten for now, but once the foundations of Xanjax are solid, we’ll check here to see how people would like Xanjax to grow or change.

If you have a gem of an idea for Xanjax we really do want to hear about it!

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Bugs & Fixes Here

March 22nd, 2008 by chappo, in Broken Stuff

This is the place to report and discuss Xanjax bugs, or post snippets of fixup code or improvements you would like officially included.

If you post often, or would like to submit something larger than a code snippet, please consider becoming a Xanjax maintainer. There are a few conditions of course in the interests of quality control and in maintaining the Xanjax philosophy of smaller, simpler, faster code.

If submitting code please submit only original code you have written, or code which is already under a free license compatible with the GPL. If you would like your code included in Xanjax, you will need to make a declaration that your code is original and available under the GPL. This is to ensure Xanjax doesn’t become the target of a patent or other intellectual property dispute.

Code is included into Xanjax only at the discretion of the official development team. If you have something useful, and for some reason it doesn’t get included in Xanjax, nevertheless it may be very useful for Xanjax users, so don’t be disappointed.

If lots of modules get submitted, we’ll add an unofficial modules download area for them.

For general assistance, or just to talk about Xanjax, please use the Xanjax Chat area.

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Finally Going Live!

March 18th, 2008 by chappo, in Xanjax Chat

Welcome to the Xanjax blog!

In case you arrived here directly, Xanjax is a micro (about 10KB) AJAX framework that enables navigation, history and bookmarks, XML to HTML direct DOM insertion, and XHTML 1.0 Strict Virtual Frames. There’s more ambitious plans too, but let’s get it going really well first.

Although this website runs entirely inside Xanjax, its current status is ‘beta release candidate,’ so we need lots of interested folks to test it out and report back!

This blog entry marks the start of first public release testing. Xanjax took a about a year in the making; it’s been a part time effort except for a couple of energetic spurts like this one to finally publish online.

I’m very new in this field. I have never released a public project before and don’t have a degree in computer science. It’s been hard work, a lot of research, and quite a lot of fun and frustration.

My thanks goes out to the many people who have publicly contributed valuable insights into AJAX navigation issues, without which Xanjax would never have been written. In particular, the websites listed under resources here have been of tremendous help; special thanks to their authors.

A special acknowledgement goes to Brad Nueberg of Coding in Paradise who initiated Really Simple History in about 2005. I think I found out about text areas for storage from his project and certainly adapted his blank html page for iframes idea to objects for my project.

Xanjax aims to be the smallest, fastest AJAX navigation framework available. If you’ve delved into the basic AJAX browser navigation issues that Xanjax aims to solve, you’ll know that many techniques have been tried in one form or another, with varying degrees of success, elsewhere. While some of these techniques have been informative, all Xanjax code is original and written from scratch.

As far as I know, Xanjax is the only fully event driven navigation solution. I hope you’ll find my slant on solving AJAX navigation both interesting and refreshing. I hope you’ll also appreciate the effort which has been (and will continue to be) put into optimizing performance. Improvements in speed, code size, ease of deployment and cross browser compatibility are, for me, ongoing goals.

Ease of use is crucial. Some effort in this direction has already been applied. Xanjax is not difficult to deploy right now, but there’s obviously more to be done.

Compatibility issues will be ongoing for some time (maybe forever), but Internet Explorers 5.5, 6.1, 7.0 and Firefox are going pretty well right now, subject of course to your feedback. It’s especially important to let me know if you think you have found a compatibility issue (and/or improved solution) with these browsers, which together probably account for 95% of Internet users. Opera is almost working with Xanjax and will hopefully be included in the compatible list soon. Safari is untested – MAC users please report. Konqueror isn’t working – KDE enthusiasts please help; the issues appear to be with window.onscroll and XMLHttpRequest.

New: Opera working as of 20080410 with addition of cancel bubble code.

Although Xanjax is quite basic at present, this web site runs in it completely. When visiting xanjax.org, the index page remains persistent in your browser. All other site content is then ‘XaNjax-ified’ into a div or object in the original index page.

Xanjax is free! For the moment it’s experimental, and of course has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.

I hope in time Xanjax will become well used and well supported. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

Have fun with it!

(Dave) Chappo

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