new page/forward in javascript

Question

I am making a greasemonkey script and i would like a link to go forward and modify the current html and allow the user to click back to go to the original page.

How might i do this? using jquery + greasemonkey + javascript. Targeting firefox mostly.

-edit- http://jsfiddle.net/ seems to do it. If you write random html in the html section, hit run, change the html and hit run again. You'll be able to click back/forward to see the output change (however the html input box stays the same). I am using firefox to view this. Thats the effect i want.

it appears the magic is done on line 91. Is this submitting a form in a frame (perhaps the results frame?) and that is causing the movement in history?

88 run: function(e) {
89 e.stop();
90 Layout.updateFromMirror();
91 document.id(this.options.formId).submit();
92 this.fireEvent('run');
93 }, 

Answer 1

I don't know if that is possible at all because it is the browser itself that takes care of the navigation history. A new history item is added only when you visit a new page.

If I am not wrong you would like the user to turn on/off the changes you make to the page without enabling/disabling greasemonkey and reloading the page.

The only solution I see for this is to take care of it yourself. Save any changes you make to the page so that you can restore it and add some UI to the page to make the user turn on or off your changes.

EDIT 1:
It seems that jsfiddle.net loads a new page to do that. Using firebug you can see it is not doing any AJAX request to run the code, it is just loading a new page (maybe the same page, with different parameters, but nevertheless it is loading a page.)

EDIT 2:
Yes, maybe it is loading the page in a frame. As you can see from the HTML:

<iframe name='result' frameBorder='0'></iframe>

But this does not change your situation. If you want your logic to be in your greasemonkey script you can't load a new page. Otherwise you should upload a web page somewhere and make it load in an iframe passing it the HTML you want to modify: this is definitely not what you want to do.

Answer 2

It sounds like you want to use a history manager. You could either track the changes you make and undo them when the user goes back, or possibly call a page refreshing function.