How do I preserve dom state in the browser history after dynamic dom manipulation?

Question

Is there a general purpose solution for preserving dom state so that when a user returns to a page by using back/forward, the whole page is in the exact state that they left it?

This post asks and answers why the behavior is inconsistent with different browsers and different javascript libraries...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1195440/ajax-back-button-and-dom-updates

...but I am curious if anyone has a general solution to this problem that doesn't require reloading the page.

Answer 1

I'm afraid there isn't, and there really can't be because we're talking about browser behavior that's completely discretionary and not standards-defined. You could use Ajax to aggressively synchronize relevant DOM state to a session on a server, and always restore from that state on page load, but that will preserve the most recent state for that page, not the state that was necessarily present at a given desired point in the browser history.