Steve Holden wrote: > As far as I'm concerned the major issue with trying to have "desktop web > apps" compete with true windowed applications is the difficulty of > maintaining sensible interactions with the interface. AJAX designs have > increased the interaction level at the expense of greater complexity - > there is more state to be transferred, and a much higher interaction > rate with the server. But the browser is a terrible front-end for AJAX > designs because it doesn't record the state changes that take place as a > result of requests for updated InnerHTML content, so if the user is > unwise enough to press the "back" button she loses all traces of the > non-page interactions that have taken place since the page was loaded. > > So "desktop web apps" should ensure that they get displayed in browser > windows with minimal user interface decoration. But even then there's > always that chance that sophisticated users will use keyboard shortcuts > like ALT-left-arrow. > > That, in summary, is why my 2004 PyCon paper[1] was subtitled "The Back > Button is Not Your Friend". > > regards > Steve > > [1]: http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/18/Setting_A_Context.pdf
There's been some interesting work done in that area as well: http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2006/01/ajax-back-button.html http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/FixingTheBackButtonThatAjaxBroke In particular, the RSH (Really Simple History) Framework is an open source solution to the problem: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/10/26/ajax-handling-bookmarks-and-back-button.html Like most things involving dynamic client side-javascript code and AJAX technology, it's a lot harder than you'd like it to be to solve the problem, but in cases where the Back button is really an issue, it's worth the effort. -Jay -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list