[OpenLayers-Dev] Browser History Support

[Erik Uzureau]

Queridos Developers,

Neither Chris nor I seems able to recollect the specifics of our previous
conclusions for the browser history problem, so I decided to go back to
the web to see what is out there. So I spent all afternoon and now all night

doing further research on the problem, and I have found a lot of interesting

material out there. Two solutions seemed to catch my eye in particular:

The first is from one Brad Neuberg who seems to be one of the first to solve

this problem, back in October of 2005. He published a series of blog
entries [1] [2], which later turned into a JavaScript library called RSH [3]
and a
companion O'Reilly Article [4] on how to use it to solve this problem.

The second, which surfaced a good year and a half after Brad's posts, is the

Yahoo Browser History Manager [5]. The workings of the library and the
rationale behind its creation are explained in plain english in a blog
entry [6] by its author, Julien Lecomte.

Reading that entry led me to the Google Web Kit's solution [7], which caught
my eye for all of about 90 seconds, by which point I had arrived here [8]
and
quickly closed the browser window in the middle of an exhaled "whoa nelly".

So basically, after spending several hours reading through the code for RSH
and the YUI BHM, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the issues and
the
generally accepted techniques for solving them.

One major sticker which differentiates the two libraries is Safari. In a
nutshell,
due to accepted bugs in the browser, the only way to provide true history
support on Safari is by using a rather complicated hack. It is not
impossible,
but it is far from simple. The question we must ask ourselves is whether or
not supporting history in Safari is worth the hassle?

Otherwise, it seems to me that what we are going to need to do is something
along the lines of the YUI approach, albeit simpler (using generic map
serialization/deserialization in lieu of the rather more complicated
modules)

If anyone has any experience with the YUI or other browser history
libraries,
please speak up. Any other opinions on what I've written above are also, of
course, very welcome.

Bona Nit,
Erik







[1]
http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/09/ajax-how-to-handle-bookmarks-and-back.html
[2] http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/09/ajax-history-libraries.html
[3]
http://www.onjava.com/onjava/2005/10/26/examples/framework/dhtmlHistory.js
[4]
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/10/26/ajax-handling-bookmarks-and-back-button.html?page=1
[5] http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/history/
[6] http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/02/21/browser-history-manager/
[7]
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/com.google.gwt.user.client.History.html
[8] http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html#Why
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