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by not2b 59 days ago
If the navigation simulates what would happen if we follow links to SPA#pos1, SPA#pos2, etc so that if I do two clicks within the SPA, and then hit Back three times I'm back to whatever link I followed to get to the SPA, I guess it's OK and follows user expectations. But if it is used as an excuse to trap the user in the SPA unless they kill the tab, not OK.
2 comments
bonesss 59 days ago
From the browsers perspective those are the same thing though. It’s a paradigm boundary.

The real answer is to have desktop applications that work like applications (buttons do what feels right), and websites that work like websites.

SPA, is a page application. Pages aren’t applications, applications aren’t pages. AutoCAD is an app, the Robotech Encyclopedia is content.

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lxgr 58 days ago
> From the browsers perspective those are the same thing though.

If the browser only allows adding at most one history item per click, I should be able to go back to where I entered a given site with at most that many back button clicks.

At a first glance, this doesn't seem crazy hard to implement? I'm probably missing some edge cases, though.

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mock-possum 59 days ago
Of course, but programmatically, how do you enforce that?
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JoshTriplett 59 days ago
Some browser APIs (such as playing video) are locked behind a user interaction. Do the same for the history API: make it so you can't add any items to history until the user clicks a link, and then you can only add one.

That's not perfect, and it could still be abused, but it might prevent the most common abuses.

EDIT: apparently Chrome tried that and it wasn't sufficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761349

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