Jump to scene > object without JS

Just wondering if there is an easy way - using several objects in a scene as anchors and using relative URLs to go to the desired scene and object. (something like /SceneA/#ObjectA)

I wouldn’t say there’s an easy way, but this post specifically handles the scene aspect of it. If you look at the code you’ll notice it looks at the hash and interprets it as a scene, but you could parse it to interpret however you want - you could first change scenes based on a initial part of the string, and then jump to an element based on another part of the string.

Thanks, Jonathan.

As Jonathan has stated … no easy way and the post he has referred to means that JS is going to have to be used at some point. Any particular reason why you ask “without JS”?

A good thing to look at, perhaps, is the History API. You can manipulate the state and url with this API and an added bonus would be that if the user left the page you could return back to where they left as you are manipulating the browsers history.

I’ve also written a small script that allows you to take params from a url and store them in a key value pair that you can then use to manipulate data inside a Hype doc.
e.g …?scene=scene1&marker=object1

This would then look something like this in Hype

hypeDocument.showSceneNamed(params['scene']); // scene1
hypeDocument.getElementById(params['marker']).scrollIntoView(); // object1

Re: JS - Idiotic and self-defeating work conditions imposed by an idiot company owner – one guy doing the work of three - no on-the-clock time for cracking the books and too burned out from minimum ten-hour workdays (often without time for lunch) for doing the same outside of work. Most training sources for JS are authored by left-brained folk that do not teach in a style that is easily assimilated by right-brained creative types, so learning requires serious blocks of time.

Not to stray too far off topic, but the great thing about how Macromedia handled script training was that they had two large printed manuals – one on theory and function and a companion volume in the form of a dictionary that included two to three real-world examples for every single term. It made it very easy to knock together some powerful scripts while teaching the theory. I was able to hit the road immediately and grow my skills easily over time. Within four months I went from zero to producing a highly complex game / reference / education project that sold 80K copies and generated $400K in company profits. The thing that made it possible was that the training was well-suited for the way that right-brained people make mental connections. Having a background as an educator, I was happy to see a software vendor that understood educational theory.

To me, it is like grad students teaching alegbra to a bunch of art students. In a typical situation, the instructors knows the content inside and out, but have no training on how to communicate it to those whose learning style was different from theirs.