Ajax For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Ten Ajax Design Issues You Should Know About

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Handling the Back button

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Thinking about security

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Storing search terms in Ajax pages

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Watching out for caching

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Ajax is a new ball of wax when it comes to Web applications, and as such, new rules about how the interface should and shouldn’t work are emerging. Those rules have not been formalized yet, but the Ajax community is discussing them. Before launching into creating your own Ajax applications, thinking about the design issues I explain in this chapter is a good idea.

You can also find more information on the best practices for Ajax programming (also called Ajax patterns) at http://ajaxpatterns.org. Chapter 12 introduces the Ajax patterns site in more detail, along with several other helpful Ajax resources.

Breaking the Back Button and Bookmarks

When you have control over what’s going on in a Web page and you’re using JavaScript to make things turn on and off in a page — or even to alter the page’s entire appearance — the browser’s Back button won’t work anymore. The Back button works from the browser’s history object, which stores the successive pages that have been loaded into the browser. But if you aren’t loading new pages — which is what Ajax is all about — the history object doesn’t ...