[OpenLayers-Dev] Browser History Support

[Paul Spencer]

Erik,

nice summary.  I've used RSH before and it worked perfectly for the  
situation I was using it in (non spatial ajax app).  I have not tried  
the YUI stuff, although I would imagine it is an excellent solution  
with Crockford behind it.

Overall, Safari is fairly important to me, but less so for specific  
functionality like this.  My vote would be to implement a simpler  
solution and wait for the next Safari version to fix these problems  
(if indeed it does fix it)

Cheers

Paul

On 6-Jun-07, at 2:30 AM, Erik Uzureau wrote:

> 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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> Dev mailing list
> Dev at openlayers.org
> http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev

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|Paul Spencer                          pspencer at dmsolutions.ca    |
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|Chief Technology Officer                                         |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                http://www.dmsolutions.ca/ |
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