6.10. Summary

While AJAX applications can tremendously improve the user experience, they don't naturally integrate with the browser navigation history feature. However, even normal Web applications suffer from poor integration with navigation history. Enabling navigation history support on an ASP.NET AJAX page not only restores the functionality a non-AJAX page would have but can improve on it.

ASP.NET AJAX supports easily creating navigation history points programmatically from the server side or client side. Server-side history points integrates well with pages that use the UpdatePanel control, while client-side history points can be used no matter how partial updates are done, even if the server-side technology is not ASP.NET.

ASP.NET AJAX history enabled pages not only provide logical navigation points for the user, but they can handle refreshes by the user, and can naturally be bookmarked or "deep linked" so that users can return to a particular state of the AJAX page.