Death of the Back Button

The PHP Grind - June 4th, 2008

I’m a big fan of ExtJs, and my current project is using a lot of it to enhance the user’s experience.  But, today I received an email listing a number of small issues with the code currently in production.  The one that struck me the most was how the “Back” button doesn’t work sometimes.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do about it.  When JavaScript-based tools take over the UI to enhance the user’s experience, the “Back” button is left behind.  I believe the death of the “Back” button in our future.  What can someone possibly tell the client that will make sense to non-programmer ears?

2 Comments

  • 1. kevinkevin  |  June 20th, 2008 at 12:12 pm

    Hey saw this and had a thought for you - lucky you right…

    I occasionally use YUI for some js tasks and on thing I noticed they had which *may* assist you is the history manager. I believe they use it in conjucntion with the client side pagination. This history manager seems to allow you to access the back button.

    maybe that is a place to look for a solution??

  • 2. gcornelisse  |  June 20th, 2008 at 12:40 pm

    I’ll take a look. I’d be interested in seeing if it can handle application level history. It isn’t so much that the Back button doesn’t work. Its more so that the Back button sends you back farther than you expected. This happen because you’re basically running a mini-application on one *page*. For instance a feed reader or email client. I click to read a couple messages, and expect the Back button to let me navigate back through the messages I clicked and read. The reality is that I never actually left the page. Everything happened in the browser without changing the URL. Therefore, the Back button was useless in this scenario. A scenario that happens more often now that we use more JS UI tools and load our data with AJAX calls.

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