I’m trying to gather some information on any techniques or even plans to change the fundamental nature of the way the internet and http requests work.
From both an advertising, and a usability perspective, the concept of a page load is becoming obsolete. Users expect instant results, and advertisers are becoming more concerned with time on site than they are with page views. You don’t need a full page view to have an ad impression anyway.
That said, there are plenty of techniques to make it so that your page can load new information without reloading the whole page. The problem is there doesn’t seem to be any good way of making it so that AJAX calls can be linked to.
My site has a somewhat weak implementation of this:
Notice that it links you to the “APM” tab of that page, and if you click the other tabs they’re all loaded via AJAX? You’ll probably notice that initially it loaded the “Overview” tab, and after the page loaded, it then switched you to the APM tab. That’s wonky behavior, and I don’t like it, but there’s not much that can be done about it as far as I know.
The problem is, as far as I know, this deep linking technique becomes increasingly difficult to implement the more variations you have on a page’s data. For example, if you have pagination, then you need to make your deep linking code support all those variations as well.
So my question is, is there a way to easily, FULLY AJAX a website, complete with the ability to deep link to any page state, without any wonky behavior (e.g. loading the “base page” first, and then after it’s loaded, switching the data)?
If not, has anyone heard of any plans to fundamentally rewrite the nature of HTML and HTTP requests so that web pages are no longer based on page loads, but state changes?