What does the term "Ajax Navigation" mean and what HTML 5 brings on this plan?
Ajax allows the browser to insert in the current page the content of a page that is pointed out by a a link, when you click on this link, without refreshing the page. On a more general view, Ajax navigation includes back and forward functions of the browser, adapted to changing content by Ajax.
Ajax allows users to display content selected from a list of links, into the same page. It can be text or images. An application example is given in the case of the Ajax image gallery script.
The term "Ajax Navigation" is sometimes used to describe a menu that develops dynamically tree submenus and loads it from a file on the server, but this has nothing to do.
Microsoft has been involved in HTML 5 with the ContentEditable object that is a edit box into an HTML page. In Internet Explorer 8, has been adapted also the behavior of the property window.location.hash.
Location is a property that contains the URL of the current page and hash is the part of the URL after the # symbol, a relative address within the page.
For example:
https://www.xul.fr/en/index.php#ajax
The hash variable contains #ajax and designates an anchor in the index.php page.
The interest of the improvement is to allow proper operation of the "back" and "forward" buttons with document loaded or modified dynamically. So if you click on a link to view a content in the current page, the back button takes you back to the prior status of the current page.
The modified window.location.hash is included in HTML 5, which therefore provides a complete Ajax navigation.
Ajax navigation Definition by Microsoft which explains its approach in Internet Explorer 8.
