Another web challenge: Back button
Richard Gaskin
ambassador at fourthworld.com
Fri Sep 23 14:50:31 EDT 2011
After thinking about the challenges of translating LC stacks into web
pages, I remembered another issues I've had to deal with in browsers
that we don't have to think about in LC:
How do your app respond when the user clicks the browser's Back button?
We have no universal "Back" message in LC; any navigation in our stacks
is entirely provided by and handled by our own code.
But users expect a meaningful response when they click their Back button
- what will your app do?
Should it always just bail out of the page entirely?
In HTML, after you've click an in-page link, Back takes you back to the
last scroll position within the page where the link was present. So
should it handle a scroll reversal? Should that be a default behavior,
and what means should be provided to override it?
It's not unrealistic (and indeed a specific request from a client) that
we design the web version of our LC-based app to revert back to a
previously-displayed content section (we hide and show a lot of divs,
generated from LC fields).
What will your app do?
If you hand-code that behavior, it will do whatever you like.
But if you expect a meaningful response from an automated translator,
your users will likely be disappointed.
This is some sticky stuff once you get into it....
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv
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