In Alex Bosworth’s list of “Ajax Mistakes”:http://sourcelabs.com/ajb/archives/2005/05/ajax_mistakes.html, breaking the back button and breaking bookmarks are two of the worst.

There’s progress afoot. Brad Neuberg presents an “open source Javascript library”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/10/26/ajax-handling-bookmarks-and-back-button.html that

brings bookmarking and back button support to AJAX applications. By the end of this tutorial, developers will have a solution to an AJAX problem that not even Google Maps or Gmail possesses: robust, usable bookmarking and back and forward behavior that works exactly like the rest of the Web.

Sadly, he found it impossible to find a technique that worked with Safari. What a step it would be if the browser makers got their heads together and built a reliable, unified platform for AJAX applications.