Summary

In this chapter, we addressed one of the main drawbacks of using Ajax. You learned how to use the HTML5 History API to create the expected behavior when a visitor of our site pushes the browser's back key, or drops a URL that they previously bookmarked, into the browser's URL bar. Even though this API is for HTML5 capable browsers, you learned that there are jQuery plugins around to support this magic in HTML4 capable browsers as well.

In the last few chapters, we started using Ajax more often to update only a portion of the screen, and to remain on the same page rather than loading a new one. As a consequence, we are exchanging smaller, but more frequent chunks of data between client and server. In the examples so far, the format of our data was HTML and it was all generated on the server. In the next chapter, you will learn two new formats for data exchange: XML and JSON.