I really dislike how a lot of multi-page navigation (i.e. getting results 51-100) is now commonly done with AJAX. It's not really faster than loading a new page, but it breaks the back button. "Oh you clicked on the 287th link and hit back? Here are results 1-50." So annoying.
The pushState API has been available for years. This isn't an inherent limitation of single page apps. Even where the pushState API isn't available (older versions of IE) the anchor tag can be be used to maintain browser history so the back button doesn't break. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/M...
But here's the deal: now the web developer has to manually do something that used to be intrinsic to the way the web worked. Really feels like a step backwards to me.
What's interesting is that in the past, all the Real web devs knew that frames suck because they break navigation. Anyone who showed their framed site in a community of cool web devs would be laughed at.
Now it's cool to break the back button (and links and everything) and make me watch spinners. It's as if the text and thumbnails they're serving today somehow take two orders of magnitude more bandwidth to load...
Devs and designers are now (more so than ever) different sets of people, and designers are now calling the shots in most places.
I'm a web dev, I know that ajax loading sucks, that without enough budget to do it right (and we never have enough budget) UX ends up broken, messing with scrolling sucks, page-based is best, don't make an app if it should actually be a site, etc.
Do I get any say? Not really. What do I end up building? Magic-scrolling ajax-loading apps, and if I have any budget left at the end of the job it goes on tweaking typography (i.e. designer-visible stuff) rather than fixing back buttons.
Which is to say, devs still know that this stuff sucks, but we're no longer in charge of the relevant decisions.
DISCOURSE I AM LOOKING AT YOU. In a real forum I'd open pages 1-n in tabs and read them on PT. On discourse I have to open the same page N times and scroll to a spread of points down the page.
