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:<p><pre><code> • Rogue-like text adventure game
• Hitchhiker's Guide
• A reading app with page-turning animation
• Color
</code></pre>
Whoever cracks that last one, mega kudos. Woz, you around? Feel like doing some magic?<p>It's also tempting to ask for a text-editor, but then, we sort of already have that!
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.<p>Turns out that that's harder than the actual game. I won in the end though.
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.<p>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.
I like the game.<p>I also played with browser history to create something more useful <a href="http://bsearch.heroku.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bsearch.heroku.com/</a> i.e. access other search engines by clicking back button while on Google.
So now we can play games in both the address bar and the favicon:
<a href="http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/" rel="nofollow">http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/</a>
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.<p>Definitely not looking for to companies using the URL page as the new scrolling status bar...
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.
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.<p>For example, a user wanting to find the elephants page on this web site would be typing <a href="http://coolstuff.com/things/elep" rel="nofollow">http://coolstuff.com/things/elep</a> (and it would suggest) hants by having hants appear after elep as selected text.<p>Or is there a good reason why address bar events are not part of the dom?