Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Navigation API (formerly app history API) (Issue #717)

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad to hear you all feel it's an improvement!

> One question I had was about how this impacts the behaviour of the back button - it wasn't exactly clear what you mean by "when iframes are involved" here. Can you spell it out a bit more clearly? Is this to do with the iframe's navigation history being integrated with the parent document's history?

This is spelled out in a bit more detail in https://github.com/WICG/navigation-api/blob/main/README.md#correspondence-with-the-joint-session-history . It is indeed about how the iframe's navigation history is integrated with the parent document's history, and how that makes programs harder to reason about even if it can give a better user experience.

That integration remains true for the back button and thus for the user's experience. It also remains true for the classic history API's `history.back()`, `history.go()`, etc.

The new feature of the navigation API is that if you use it, then the developer only has to deal with their own frame's history. I.e. instead of how the classic history API has you traverse through the all-inclusive history entry list, with the navigation API you get separate history entry lists for each frame. The section I linked above has specific examples, including what this means for `navigation.back()` behaving differently than `history.back()`.

However, implementing the navigation API does not imply any UI changes, or changes in the behavior of the back button.

I hope this helps, and am happy to clarify more. Other relevant sections:

- https://github.com/WICG/navigation-api/blob/main/README.md#impact-on-the-back-button-and-user-agent-ui
- https://github.com/WICG/navigation-api/blob/main/README.md#warning-backforward-are-not-always-opposites
- https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/6501

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