Hey, So I just find this interesting, and was wondering if anyone knew how to do this. If anyone has gone to facebook.com and logged in, you will notice there is a little bar at the bottom of your screen. Whenever you navigate through Facebook, the main page reloads, url changes, all of that (So no iframe). But that bottom bar never changes. It is always there and never gets reloaded (You can test this by highlighting the bar and then navigating through pages) How do they do this? All I know is it has to do with javascript. EDIT: Sorry, wrong section (I posted in the wrong window I had opened)
Im pretty certain it uses AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to load the pages in the background so it doesn't have to load pages to get the content
They use ajax, which is processed via page -> javascript -> server -> javascript -> page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX I think they use the prototype framework: http://www.prototypejs.org/
But what about it re-writing the url? And when you click on a link, the page actually loads (It shows the little loading wheel in firefox on the tab)
Not that sorta loading wheel. I mean when you load a page in firefox, its tab (if you have more than one site opened) will show a loading wheel in the tab itself.
I would say that the header and footer aren't reloaded every time a link is clicked, so I don't think there is any url rewrite going on it a new page being loaded with exception of the header and footer content. I found this article which may be what is happening: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajaxified-body-when-to-refresh-the-page