| In this new entry on his blog today, Isolani talks about "fixing the back button that Ajax broke".
One of the common disadvantages of AJAX is that it typically breaks the expected back button functionality. AJAX breaks one of the fundamental rules of the World Wide Web: one URL refers to one resource/document. There are three main stumbling blocks created by this development approach: Clicking back from an AJAX page, Clicking forward to an AJAX page, Bookmarking a document created by AJAX.
If each document created by an AJAX application can be addressed by its own URL, then we can conceptually solve the broken back button problem (and the bookmarking problem to boot). If you can address the GMail Inbox view by one URL, and the contents of the selected email at a different URL then we have the expected situation of one URL referring to one resource document.
He looks a bit more at each of the items that Ajx breaks, including a mention of how Ajax fundamentally "breaks the web". He does offer some suggestions to help alleviate the problem, though - no code examples, though. He just talks about correcting the browser's history object to accomidate this kind of application... |
Isolani's Blog: 
