[whatwg] Onpopstate is Flawed

[Justin Lebar]

I'm a bit uncomfortable with this behavior, since it seems that having
replaceState cancel the initial popstate is at least somewhat
surprising.

How is this better than never firing an initial popstate?

-Justin

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 6:32 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 6:18 PM, Henry Chan
> <henry.fai.hang.chan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It fixes the bit where back/forward before onload doesn't fire onpopstate.
>> But no, it still doesn't let us detect inital onpopstate.  And back/forward
>> buttons don't work properly until onload.  A workaround would be to assign
>> the handlers to the <a> tags at onload but again that's not feasible for my
>> site.  I need it domready.
>> Please make onpopstate fire as early as possible in the navigation sequence.
>>  And drop the pending state object.  I need exactly each firing.  Not just
>> the last one.
>
> Would the following behavior solve your issue:
>
> If pushState or replaceState is called before the initial popstate,
> simply don't fire the after-onload-popstate.
>
> If the back button is pressed (or history.back() is called) after a
> pushState/replaceState, but before onload, fire a popstate for the
> newly transitioned to state. Still leave the after-onload-popstate
> canceled.
>
> I.e. if the webpage calls pushState or replaceState before onload
> fires, then it is deemed that the page has transitioned to the new
> state and no after-onload-popstate is needed.
>
> This behavior makes the most sense to me and allows the page to start
> handling state transitions before the page finishes loading.
>
> / Jonas
>