Coding In Paradise

So after $30 dollars renting a Mac, sitting here at this Internet cafe, I've made alot of progress in creating support for being able to know when the back and forward buttons are pressed in DHTML apps for Safari. I found a reliable solution (only tested in Safari 1.3 so far though), of detecting history changes, reporting the history change and new location back to the developer. There is one small bug I'm still hacking away at.

I still have not found a way to incorporate bookmarking into this for Safari; I won't stop until I do! :)

I already have a good solution for IE and FireFox; Safari is my last hold out. I also have a good DhtmlHistory API that is very simple to work with, that I will wrap around these techniques so they are easy for developers to work with. Ultimately the browsers themselves should support such an API, rather than having to depend on obscure browser hacks.

Here are today's alt.space tidbits:

• "How one company is making space pay:" SpaceDev's Jim Benson on the 'killer apps' that lie beyond Earth


• An interesting discussion on the standard robots vs. humans debate in space exploration


• Interesting review of hazards faced by long-term living in space

Wow, Apple is actually claiming that their broken implementation of iframes in Safari is a feature, not a bug; from their Safari Developer FAQ:

"Safari's Back/Forward cache (the cache pulled from when a visitor presses the Back or Forward browser buttons) can also be thwarted by insuring that your page contains a frame. Frame-based pages are never stored in the back / forward cache and you can insure your non-frame based page behaves similarly by adding the invisible iframe below."

I'm speechless.

See more about what Apple says about this bug.

So I'm sitting in the Used Computer Store out in Berkeley, renting an old Macintosh so I can get access to the Safari web browser (I don't have a Mac). I'm spending today trying to figure out a reliable way to detect history changes for DHTML applications, which I haven't been able to figure out how to do so far. At 6 dollars an hour I hope I find it soon. Wish me luck!