Screen Navigator

What is the Screen Navigator?

The Screen Navigator component is built for easy web app navigation management for smartphones. Current target platforms are the iPhone and Android devices.

What does it do?

Using the Screen Navigator and its customizable options, you can create a series of web pages that are seamlessly pulled onto the device and transitioned back and forth. When this component is used with Mobile FSS CSS, you can be up and running very quickly with a native-looking web app. Of course, like the rest of FSS, Mobile FSS can be easily customized to your desired look and feel.

Workflow Assumptions

In order to use the Screen Navigator in its current state, there are a few assumptions that need to be considered:

1. It doesnt make sense when used inside a browser interface - the browser already has controls to do everything the Screen Navigator does.
2. It requires <a> tags with href's to navigate back and forth between screens of content
3. It has not been tested in a nested scenario, although it should theoretically work

Architectural Concerns

Most current JavaScript toolkits for iPhone development place a number of restrictions on the content and the behaviour of the UI to enable transformations and the like. These include:

1. Removal of the ability to bookmark pages
2. URL state is out of sync with displayed resources (one URL for a whole sequences of pages in a navigation) due to AJAX
3. History Management
4. Footprint or contract is placed on how the content itself (the HTML pages) is structured

Our goal is to ensure that users can take advantage of the Screen Navigator without requiring them to substantially change their markup or content to accommodate it. As such, the Screen Navigator should be easily removable: pages should continue to work even if it's not present. We'll also do our best to address the issue of stable URLs for AJAX-loaded pages so that all the features users have come to expect from the Web will be available if authors desire to provide them.