I’ve recently been working with the awesome Really Simple History javascript library to make Ajax loaded pages bookmarkable, it’s a bit confusing at times, but really not too hard. But it’s amazing when you work on something like that, how much it makes you notice when other websites don’t execute the little things well. For example, when you go to your wall-to-wall with someone in Facebook, post a message and then hit back nothing changes. You have to hit back again to get back to your profile. Essentially, the interface is wasting the fact that the roundtrip to the server has been done with Ajax. Grr.

The thing that gets on my nerves the most about javascript, is it’s silent deaths. I have a function XpathAttr that if you don’t pass it the correct parameter, In this case a XMLHTTPRequest object, it dies. No error, no Exception, no nothing.

Now I realise I could throw my own exception, or check that the xml parameter is actually the right type of object. But I really don’t care. I just want it to let me know execution has halted, here. Grr.