Don't Break the Back Button! How to Use JavaScript Carefully

Course details

If you're a web developer who is using JavaScript to update the content of web pages dynamically, you could be breaking the web browser!

How? The "back" button is by far the most used navigational element in the browser. It gives people browsing the web the confidence to click on links as they know they can go back to where they were if they do something wrong. They expect it to always work.

By updating part of a web page using client-side script, the behaviour of this button can be broken. This can frustrate and annoy visitors to your website, which will make them leave!

The recent introduction of the HTML5 History API allows us to fix this - we can do partial page updates and tell the browser that the content has changed, thereby keeping the back button in full working order.

In this course you'll learn:

• How page navigation and the browser history work
• How we can break the back button by doing partial page updates
• How to fix it using the HTML5 History API
• How to overcome inconsistencies in the API by using the History dot js JavaScript library
• How to provide support for the history API in older, HTML4 browsers.

Throughout the course we'll be building a sample website that demonstrates all the techniques discussed in the lectures. Complete, working, fully-annotated source code is included.