Comment by 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
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
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.
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.
It’s definitely possible to make a really stellar experience, but that winds up being the exception. The URL and history state are sort of “invisible” elements of the user experience but require thoughtful care and attention to what the user expects/wants at each step, a level of attention which is already a rarity in web development even in the most visible parts of a page…so frequently the history/back button stuff just totally sucks.
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It's pretty weird, my impression is that the APIs are flexible enough to implement most sane behaviors, but websites keep managing to mess it all up. Perhaps it's just one of those things that no one bothers re-testing as the codebase changes.
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