Firefox: The technique to

John_audson — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 10:37:39 +0000

Firefox: The technique to make History Management work in Firefox is based on polling. When the location hash (the # in the url) is changed, the FF history engine adds a new entry in the window.history array. HistMan looks for a change in the hash and when there’s a change it executes a callback function of which the hash refers to. The interval for polling is set at 200 ms. This means that there’s a change there’s a delay of 200 ms before the callback function is called. Lowering the interval would decrease this delay but would increase the processor usage on the client-side.

IE6+/Opera9: When HistMan is loaded it creates an hidden iframe. To add a new history entry to the history engine, we change the iframe’s location.href to a url including a GET request. The GET request sets some javascript that’s attached to the onload event of the body of the page that’s loaded into the iframe. The javascript then executes the callback function and changes the hash of it’s parent. When the location.href is changed, a new history entry is added, so that makes the back and forward navigation buttons work.

Well, assuming that the user

decibel.places — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:14:09 +0000

Well, assuming that the user follows the expected procedure, that is fine.

One of the profoundest experiences I had was letting a class of 3rd graders loose on a JS quiz app I was developing - talk about unexpected input!

Yes, using POST/GET on a submission page is a good practice, but the question here is what happens to the AJAX data if the user hits the browser back button?

You would have thought by

greg — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:59:51 +0000

You would have thought by now that this issue would have been resolved within the browsers. Even a more stable ability to not cache post data would be useful.

The other alternative is using a session or other means to determine if the data is old/has been used already. That way the code wont get post data and do what it would with it had it been the first run or data is the same. Of course that's not always possible, depending on the data usage.

And is exactly why I only ever use POST and GET data on a page that isn't processed in the users browser.
No output at all, get post or get data, do calculations (or whatever) with it then redirect the user to a set of results or next form page or whatever (or back to the previous page with error report)

Maybe possible with Ffox and

decibel.places — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:49:46 +0000

Maybe possible with Ffox and Opera - does IE provide an API to the toolbar buttons?

Other possibilities are cookies and $_SESSION variables...