Ajax Back/Forward History problem – saving document state by document.save()

Hi,

Forgot to send a copy to the WebAPIs working group, here it is.

A copy has been send to: Domscripting Task Force; Eric Costello, 
Peter-Paul Koch, Jon Udell

One major thing that keeps me from using Ajax up to the limits is the 
web browser Back/Forward history problem; it looks like that many users 
just can't live without it. I am now wondering if this problem wouldn't 
be best solved by adding a new document method, something like 
document.save(pathname), which would save the active document state to 
the web browser cache (user agent cache). The pathname argument would 
specify the changed portion of the URL, including any search string.

A simplified example, you have a web page http://www.domain.com/table, 
this document shows a table with 20 rows. The user clicks a "show 100 
rows" link, JavaScript loads the missing 80 rows via xmlhttp, adds the 
rows dynamically to the table and invokes 
document.save('table?rows=100'). Now there are two documents in the web 
browser cache, "table" and "table?rows=100", which can be accessed by 
the web browser history as any regular loaded document.

Questions

- Does this approach sound to be a reasonable solution?

- Is this approach already proposed, discussed or in work?

- Would it be easy to implement by user agent vendors?

Thanks for any feedback.

Karl Heinz Pongratz

Received on Saturday, 19 November 2005 18:27:42 UTC