TechNayak(mirror)

There are a lot problems that Ajaxifying a site presents and one of them is navigation control. Bookmarking and the back button functionality namely the user behavior when using a browser have been around since the early days of the browser. With the advent of Rich applications and more Ajax, the concept of browser navigation is challenged. Gmail did a god job of navigation control, though I still remember struggling during its early days wondering why the back button wouldnt work.

Whilst coding some of my infant steps in Ajax, I looked around for hacks to the back and the refresh button functionality but was unable to find any . Thankfully I did read some useful pointers about hacks on the navigation front from Brad Neuberg( thanks YUI blog for getting me back to this article). Even a old school article about how not to disrupt user behavior when developing Rich apps.

But there is hope in the horizon and a new addition to the recently released YUI v2.2.0 intends to do just that. The new version of YUI has browser history manager, a simple library that helps in developing rich apps, all ajaxified, yet maintaining the traditional behaviors like bookmarks and navigation. Its still experimental, but worth a look if you are trying to break that browser history barrier.