[whatwg] Do we really need history.clearState()?

[Marius Gundersen]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:16 AM, Brady Eidson <beidson at apple.com> wrote:

> I should've responded to this more directly:
>
> On Nov 12, 2009, at 12:00 PM, Justin Lebar wrote:
>
> > I think the use case I proposed is much better served by something
> > like history.truncate(numBefore, numAfter), which would remove all but
> > the numBefore entries before the current entry and the numAfter
> > entries after the current entry.  We'd subject this to the same-origin
> > policy, of course, and stop removing entries in a direction as soon as
> > we encountered an entry from another origin.
>
> The History object is - quite purposefully - very limited in scope and
> abilities.  Today, it gives the ability to navigate back and forward a
> number of steps.  Period.
>
> The pushState() API adds a very limited way of adding new items
> programatically.  clearState() also adds the ability for a script to remove
> entries, but only ones that it added.  Period.
>
> Same-origin policy be damned, I really don't like the idea of a script
> being able to remove items that it didn't add.
>
> As I said in my previous reply, I think it might be useful to give a more
> fine-grained version of "clearState()", but that could always be added later
> if there's demand.  And I still think it should be limited to affecting the
> string of the Document object's entries.
>

I don't think the history.truncate function proposed would be able to affect
other Document object's entries. So for example, if the current history
looks like this:

A1 A2 B1 *B2* B3 B4 C1 C2

Then you can only call history.truncate(1, 2). If you call it with a higher
number in either parameter, then you will get a same origin exception. If
the numbers are smaller though, it would still work. For example, calling
history.truncate(0,1) would leave the following in your history:

A1 A2 B1 *B2* B4 C1 C2

I think this is the usecase clearState is designed for, but it's just not
implemented in a very good way. This would not add a lot of extra work, and
wouldn't complicate it for the user. truncate could also be called with no
parameters, in which case it would clear the entire Document object's
history, similarly to clearState.

Marius Gundersen
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