Weird IE & Javascript issue

Question

So I'm creating some HTML using javascript based on where the user clicks on the page. On page load the script replaces an empty div with a ul and some data. The user clicks on that data to receive more and so on. Now when the user navigates off the page and then hits the back button to go back to the page, IE displays a blank page with the replaced divs, in all other browsers, FF, Opera, Safari, the page either reloads to the initial ul or goes back to the last state with the dynamic data in it.

Anyone have an idea as to what might be happening here? Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

It sounds like you need to manage the history and state of your page. Check our Brad Neuberg's Really Simple History.

Answer 2

The behaviour of onload events when navigating backwards and forwards is not standard cross browser. As a general rule, I have found that when you click back, onload events tend not to work as the browser is loading it from cache rather than re-requesting the page. What you can try is using the dom ready event rather than window load.

Answer 3

Trull's answer is along the right lines. Opera and later Firefox(>1.5) do not consider loading a page from the cache as requiring to trigger an onload event as the complete DOM state is also cached.

This is trivial to standardise across browsers, as Opera and Firefox do not exhibit this behaviour if you define a window.onunload event. See http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_Firefox_1.5_caching