Comment by thijsvandien

6 days ago

While I like this approach as well, these URLs ending up in the browser history isn’t ideal. Autocomplete when just trying to go to the site causes some undesired state every now and then. Maybe query params offer an advantage over paths here.

18 comments

thijsvandien

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DrewADesign  6 days ago

I think it’s a “use the right tool for the job” thing. Putting ephemeral information like session info in URLs sucks and should only be done if you need to pass it in a get request from a non-browser program or something, and even then I think you should redirect or rewrite the url or something after the initial request. But I think actual navigational data or some sort of state if it’s in the middle of an important action is acceptable.

But if you really just want your users to be able to hit refresh and not have their state change for non-navigational stuff like field contents or whatever, unless you have a really clear use case where you need to maintain state while switching devices and don’t want to do in server-side, local storage seems like the idiomatic choice.

linked_list  6 days ago

JS does have features for editing the history, but it's a trade-off of not polluting the history too much while still letting the user navigate back and forth

  • orphea  6 days ago

    I'm glad to see that prismjs site mentioned by the blog is doing the right thing - when it updates the URL, it replaces the current history item.

    • embedding-shape  6 days ago

      Does that handle back button correctly? Nothing more annoying that sites/apps that overwrites the history incorrectly, so when you press the back button it goes to the entry before you entered the website/app, rather than back into what you were doing in the website/app.

      Both approaches (appending/rewriting) have their uses, the tricky part is using the right thing for the right action, fuck up either and the experience is abysmal.

      9 replies →

Dwedit  6 days ago

My personal take would be if it takes you to what's basically another page (such as the entire page being rewritten), then involve browser history.

porridgeraisin  6 days ago

Yeah, lichess does this.

On lichess.org/analysis, each move you make adds a history item, lichess.org/analysis#1, #2, and so on.

Pretty annoying.

hamdingers  6 days ago

Browser autocomplete behavior is reliably incorrect and infuriating either way, so it's not a good reason to avoid the utility of having bookmarkable/sharable urls.