Brad Neuberg has published an article on O’Rielly’s OnJava.com. In this, he presents a solution that has long hampered AJAX web development. When using GMail, ever accidently click the back/forward button out of habit only to leave the gmail site? It is quite an annoying reality that we’ve had to live with because nobody had been able to fix how to navigate around abstract applications like Gmail. Well now, at least one solution has been presented. In quickly looking through the code, everything appears to make sense, but it seems like it might be a bit tricky to implement. Check out two of the demos here and here.

This is interesting because just last night I was listening to one of the recent Web 2.0 podcasts and one of the hosts or the interviewee (a Flock developer) said the AJAX/history button problem lied a bit further upstream and was something the browser developers would have to fix. While that would be optimal as it would not require use to code the hack, I wouldn’t even know how they could begin fixing that issue.

Let the true web applications begin!