Is there a standard way of defining the href that opens in a document.open call?

Question

The dilemma that I'm dealing with is that in the jquery-bbq code, because IE6 and IE7 do not support hashchange, they load pages twice in order to have a history state.

This has a negative effect because code runs twice on both server-side and client-side. The method used to create the iframe is this:

  if ( is_old_ie ) {

    // Create hidden IFRAME at the end of the body.
    iframe = $('<iframe src="javascript:0"/>').hide().appendTo( 'body' )[0].contentWindow;

    // Get history by looking at the hidden IFRAME's location.hash.
    get_history = function() {
      return get_fragment( iframe.document.location.href );
    };

    // Set a new history item by opening and then closing the IFRAME
    // document, *then* setting its location.hash.
    set_history = function( hash, history_hash ) {
      if ( hash !== history_hash ) {
        var doc = iframe.document;
        doc.open().close();
        doc.location.hash = '#' + hash;
      }
    };

    // Set initial history.
    set_history( get_fragment() );
  }

A blank iframe with a src of javascript:0 is created. The document.open method is called, and it seems like it grabs the location.href of the parent window as the default for the page that opens with .open.

I basically have to modify the code so that it doesn't open the same url twice, so I'm looking to override the default and specify a param such as ?iframe=true.

Example:

http://example.com/views/step-2?one=two

In IE, the page above gets loaded and then gets loaded again in an iframe. The server-side code executes twice, but I don't want that to happen.

I want to append &iframe=1 to the URI so I can prevent my server-side code from running if the iframe param is specified.

The two most obvious things are:

1. Set the src of the iframe, but this could have a negative effect and I'm pretty sure it's there for a reason.
2. Instead of use document.open.close, use iframe.location.href and set it to the href manually.

If anyone has had experience with iframe hacking, I'd greatly appreciate some tips.

EDIT: Another workaround I thought of would be loading a page through iframe/ajax that sets a session var before the iframe does the document.open, which creates a session variable of 'iframeloading' which is equal to 1, and set a load event handler on iframe load to set it back to 0, and adjust my server-side code to not execute if the session var is set to 1. Something like:

$('<iframe src="/iframe-loading.php"/>').hide().appendTo('body');
document.open().close()
 $( document.defaultView ).load(function() {
    $('<iframe src="iframe-doneloading.php/>').hide().appendTo('body');
});

Answer 1

About "Is there a standard way of defining the href that opens in a document.open call?"

No, there is not.