Navigation: navigate event

Limited availability

This feature is not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers.

Experimental: This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.

The navigate event of the Navigation interface is fired when any type of navigation is initiated, allowing you to intercept as required.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

js
addEventListener("navigate", (event) => {});

onnavigate = (event) => {};

Event type

A NavigateEvent. Inherits from Event.

Event NavigateEvent

Examples

Handling a navigation using intercept()

js
navigation.addEventListener("navigate", (event) => {
  // Exit early if this navigation shouldn't be intercepted,
  // e.g. if the navigation is cross-origin, or a download request
  if (shouldNotIntercept(event)) {
    return;
  }

  const url = new URL(event.destination.url);

  if (url.pathname.startsWith("/articles/")) {
    event.intercept({
      async handler() {
        // The URL has already changed, so show a placeholder while
        // fetching the new content, such as a spinner or loading page
        renderArticlePagePlaceholder();

        // Fetch the new content and display when ready
        const articleContent = await getArticleContent(url.pathname);
        renderArticlePage(articleContent);
      },
    });
  }
});

Note: Before the Navigation API was available, to do something similar you'd have to listen for all click events on links, run event.preventDefault(), perform the appropriate History.pushState() call, then set up the page view based on the new URL. And this wouldn't handle all navigations — only user-initiated link clicks.

Handling scrolling using scroll()

In this example of intercepting a navigation, the handler() function starts by fetching and rendering some article content, but then fetches and renders some secondary content afterwards. It makes sense to scroll the page to the main article content as soon as it is available so the user can interact with it, rather than waiting until the secondary content is also rendered. To achieve this, we have added a scroll() call between the two.

js
navigation.addEventListener("navigate", (event) => {
  if (shouldNotIntercept(navigateEvent)) {
    return;
  }
  const url = new URL(event.destination.url);

  if (url.pathname.startsWith("/articles/")) {
    event.intercept({
      async handler() {
        const articleContent = await getArticleContent(url.pathname);
        renderArticlePage(articleContent);

        event.scroll();

        const secondaryContent = await getSecondaryContent(url.pathname);
        addSecondaryContent(secondaryContent);
      },
    });
  }
});

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# event-navigate

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also