User:Kcdipesh/Hijax

Hijax Hijax is an new technology that roots its way up from AJAX. In other words 'Hijax' is the name for the application of progressive enhancement to AJAX. Many people also like to call it 'Simplified Ajax'. For this allows the use of AJAX to increase usability and responsiveness without harming accessibility and can, as a side-effect, increase server side code quality. It is called Hijax because there is a standard HTML web page underneath but its normal communication with the server is highjacked and redirected to create the AJAX effects. But why Hijax over Ajax? Obviously,

Development History
Ajax has truly revolutionized the web with far better user Experience. Gone are the days with long waiting for complete page loads during switching from one page to another. With Ajax only the target content is updated within lesser time ,consumes less server side resources, reducing bandwidth loads drastically. However it was incapable of remembering user's history and bookmarking as Ajax made no changes URL. Then came url hashing concept and the problem could be solved. But another important issue remaine Web Crawlers find difficult to crawl into ajax based websites and hence became SEO unfriendly! Google implemented the concept of 'hashbang' to solve this problem too.(Exclamation sign(!) is used just after hash symbol(#)like in www.example.com/#!newcontent  ). But still not every search engines have adopted this, so AJAX is still a challenge for Search Engine Optimization(SEO).

Problems like these could be solved using new techniques but the biggest problem faced by AJAX application is its backward compatiblity. For devices that does not support javascript, or simply has this functionality disabled, or that doesn't support XMLHttpRequest, ajax is not just useless but also a huge problem as the contents are not accessible. For this reason AJAX has been facing many criticisms like "...it must degrade well. It must still be accessible. It must be usable. If not, it is a cool useless piece of rubbish for some or many people."

What is Hijaxing
Without ajax, normal links make the browser load a new page, and the entire site has to get loaded. With AJAX only a target page element updated, and except for the hash segment of the URL everything else is untouched. HIJAX comes as hybrid. It makes use of an API in which each link or form points to a particular DOM element. When a link or a form is clicked, you can clearly see the browser's reloading signs and the new updated with updated URL and exactly the desired page elements updated, everything else untouched! This is what everybody wanted and is possible with HIJAX. Now even in the absence of javascript the URL still points to the page with new content so is a graceful degradation and of course is a Progressive enhancement,that is  you're starting out with just basic content, and want to add better functionality for browsers that support it without breaking the site for those that don't.