[OpenLayers-Dev] Browser History Support

[John R. Frank]

Hi Erik,

Great research --- thanks for the links.  (Yeah on the "whoa nelly"!)

While I don't personally use (or much like) Safari, I have done enough
presentations and tutorials with people that do, that I believe apps that
do not support Safari hurt themselves in the marketplace --- especially
because most of people who have looked at me with indignation for
suggesting FireFox over Safari have been large-cranium big thinkers
working on world-changing projects.

John



On Wed, 6 Jun 2007, 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
>