Perhaps the best thing to come out of The AJAX Experience 2008 was the opportunity I had to discuss the future of history management (think about it) with Brad Neuberg and Brian Dillard.
Beyond the immediate discussions of where our respective libraries were headed, we decided that we should take this opportunity to address the HTML 5 Specification and ensure that it meets our needs. It would be disastrous to get this far toward supporting a standardized history management implementation to only have it cripple us in the years to come.
So, what we’re doing is getting input from all of the people who have played key roles in the current generation of history managers and seeing if they have any comments about the spec as it stands. Brian is talking about it, I’m talking about it, and we’ve heard back from Bertrand Le Roy as well. Our main goal is simply to bring this topic the attention it needs. If you want to contribute some of your thoughts on the history section of the spec you can leave your ideas in the comments and I’ll see to it that they’re addressed.
Once we’ve compiled all of our comments we’ll deliver them to Ian Hickson and Dave Hyatt and begin the discussion of whether/how to amend the spec to meet the needs we see. I’ll keep everybody up to date on the news for this front as it develops.