[whatwg] Onpopstate is Flawed

[Jonas Sicking]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Justin Lebar <justin.lebar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

My thinking was that if someone calls replaceState, then probably that
means that they're currently changing the page to represent that new
state. If they do that then I don't see that they initial popstate
would help them in any way?

Yet another solution would be to always expose the current state
through a member on the window or the document. Then popstate would
represent any transition in the current state and wouldn't be needed
for the initial page load.

So during loading, any script that wants to know what the initial (or
current) state is does not need to wait for the first popstate, but
can simply grab the state and go.

The main problem I can think of with this design, apart from it being
a bigger change from what we've got, is what happens if someone
modifies the current-state member on the window/document. While we can
make the member read-only, that doesn't help if the state is a deep
object hierarchy. In IndexedDB we decided to not attempt to solve the
problem and instead rely on authors not to trigger the footgun.

/ Jonas