Hi,
As usual I think I must be missing something fundamental!
It would be pretty serious to leave the back functionality - someone could delete a contact, then press back and see the name again. If they subsequently do another delete, there's trouble!
I'm thinking this problem is not simply due to the caching - if I loaded the page from the db each time the browser would still have its own copy of what-was-once there. I think this must be a problem which occurs in many projects?
Regards, Andy
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Have a look at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html. The author (Jakob Nielsen) is a web usability expert and placed "breaking the back button" as the number one mistake in web design (as of 1999). His reasoning is that the back button is the second most frequently used feature on the web (behind the hyperlink itself) and that web designers who use any of several mechanisms to prevent users from accessing that functionality are annoying and perturbing their users. Speaking specifically to the point of showing out-of-date data, Mr. Nielsen is of the opinion that backtracking should be instantaneous - i.e., should not cause a refresh to the server.
As I mentioned before, there are always exceptions to this rule. The application I am developing, for example, is a commercial application. The only people who use it are our employees and our clients (who pay us money). We have a high degree of control over the end users' environments and train all of the users on how to use the application. It's more of a traditional desktop application than a web application, it's just using HTML as the user interface instead of Swing. We hide all of the browser chrome, maximize the window, and disable all standard browser shortcuts using IE-specific JavaScript.
One of the most important principles in usability design is to do what the user expects. In our application, we train our users on what to expect from our application and provide visual reminders by hiding the browser chrome. They know they are not in a stanard Web environment. If you can't do that, I think you should allow their browser to do what their browser usually does.
Regardless of which approach you use, your server-side application *always* needs to be robust enough to handle invalid requests. If a user attempts to delete something that has already been deleted or add something that has already been added, you should simply provide them with a friendly message that they or somebody else already did that, and the token mechanism seems to be a good solution to all of those potential problems.
Just my two cents,
-- Jeff
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