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

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?

开发者_如何学运维This post asks and answers why the behavior is inconsistent with different browsers and different javascript libraries...

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.

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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.

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You can use this cache busting technique in rails to make it work in modern browsers (chrome, ie8+, ff 3.5+). This worked for me on my last project when we had ajax update the dom and had to navigate back and have the ajax updates persist.

response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate"
response.headers["Pragma"] = "no-cache"
response.headers["Expires"] = "Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT"