Disclaimer: this post is intended to be humorous and the techniques described in this post are not recommend for use for any website that wishes to keep visitors.

I’ve been waiting for a chance to play with the HTML5 History APIs since seeing it on Google’s 20thingsilearned.com. After reading Dive into HTML5’s take on the History API today (thanks to a pointer by Mark Trapp), I finally came up with a great way to play around with the API.

Teaser: it turns out that this API can be used for evil on WebKit browsers. I’ll get to that after the fun part.

The web of the 90’s was a much more “interesting” place. Animated GIF icons were the rage, loud pages and <blink> were the norm and our friend, the <marquee> tag used to give us impossible-to-read scrolling messages.

If you can see this moving, your browser is rocking the marquee tag

Over time, the web grew up and these animations died out. Marquees made a short comeback as animated <title> s, but thankfully those never caught on.

The Modern Browser

The world of the 2011 browser is much different than the browser of the 90’s. Early browsers had a tiny, cramped location bar with terrible usability. In modern browsers, the location, function and usability bar is now the one of the primary focuses of the UI.

Given that, it seems like this large browser UI is ripe for some exploitation. What if we could resurrect marquee, but give it all of the screen real-estate of today’s large, modern location bar?

With that in mind, I give you THE MARQUEE OF TOMORROW:

<script> function beginEyeBleed() { var i = 0; var message = "Welcome to the marquee of tomorrow! Bringing the marquee tag back in HTML5! "; setInterval(function() { var scroller = message.substring(i) + message.substring(0, i); scroller = scroller.replace(/ /g, "-"); window.history.replaceState('', 'scroller', '/' + scroller); i++; i %= message.length; }, 100); } </script>

Try it out! (if you’re viewing this on my blog in an HTML5-capable browser)



And now for the evil part.

It turns out that some browsers weren’t designed to handle this level of awesomeness. Trying to navigate away from a page that turns this on can be tricky. Firefox 4 works well: just type something into the location bar and the bar stop animating. WebKit-based browsers are a different story.

On Safari, every replaceState call removes what you’ve typed into the location bar and replaces it with the new data. This makes it impossible to navigate away by typing something else into the bar. Clicking one of your bookmarks will take you away from the page, however.

On Chrome, the same thing happens, but it’s even worse. Every replaceState call not only wipes out the location bar, but it cancels navigate events too. Clicking on bookmarks has no effect. The only recourse is to close the tab at this point.

Edit: comments on this post have noted that you can refresh, or go back to get off the page. You can also click a link on the page to navigate away.

Edit: the location bar seems to be find in Chrome on non-Mac platforms. Ubuntu is reportedly OK and Windows 7 performed OK in my test just now. The bookmark navigation issue is still a problem on the other platforms.

Overall, the new HTML5 history marquee is a pretty effective way of drawing eyeballs and, in some cases, forcing longer pageview times.

I filed issue 75195 for Chromium on this. I’ll file one for Safari as well.

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