User Interfaces and Logging

The browser history takes on a new reputation in light of modern web application development. It seems that the browser history — the navigation capability of web browsers used to traverse web 1.0 — can either help, or just get in the way. The browser history might get in the way if you're striving for the complete desktop experience in your UI. This is where the back button is viewed as a hindrance, something antiquated that our code must be prepared to handle but offers no practical usability. On the other hand, the browser history is something that the web grew up with. It's as natural as HTTP or HTML in a web application. The web is supposed to be stateless. The URI a user visits inside an application shouldn't care about order. Regardless of what patterns your web application follows, the user interface needs to communicate and change state. With modern Javascript toolkits, the state of the user interface itself is becoming more and more detached from the state of the server-side resource.