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by Aachen
2307 days ago
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Twitter seems to have the back thing down somehow. I don't know how it works (my best guess is making a <div style=height:scrollTop-200px> and only loading a few tweets around the scroll position and making that work with bfcache) but so it is apparently possible to make that work fine. Linking to things in the middle of a page was solved in the 90s with the hash part of the URL. Aside from legal terms or privacy policies, I haven't yet seen a site with excessively tall pages that don't have some mechanism (hash part or direct linking an entry) of linking to in-the-middle content. Most sites with infinite scroll don't have a footer, though I have seen a few. Inspect element works well enough there imo, if you're tech savvy of course. |
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And then promptly broken again in the mid-00s more or less till now, by way of sub-par client side routing, giving rise to SPAs and breaking back buttons, history management and deep linking all over the place. Things are getting slightly better since the history api came about, but you still see loads of sites with non-existent or broken deep linking, and crappy history management, such as reddit. This is of course because the browser behavior of fragment links, history etc. on static content is well defined, but for dynamic content in most cases have to be considered and implemented in the application logic, and it’s never a priority.
Hands up everyone who’s been in planning sessions for your project and right from the start you’ve considered deep linking and history management! Anyone..? No, ok.
Truth is, in my near 15 years of web dev experience, I’ve never once seen this be part of the requirements, because you kind of just expect it to work. Yet it’s incredibly easy to break, unintentionally even, and three weeks before release it’s usually incredibly difficult to fix because of all the corners we’ve painted ourselves into. So then it becomes a thing you fix after the fact, and spend tons of time tryin to figure out how to wrangle your router or framework or what have you to work it out, but turns out you’ll probably have to rewrite it all. But of course you won’t, because it’s silly, so it just becomes one of those things you paper over where possible and quietly ignore otherwise... sigh
Sorry for the rant.