It's my first HTML/javascript question which I raised on meta without results yet, On Stack Overflow I reload my tags page which displays questions related to my selected tags.
If I want to go back to the previous results/page with a reload, then a question I wanted to check isn't possible because it's going back in history to a different page (or a blank page).
Can I go to the previous view? Is it impossible?
Sometimes questions are deleted or have changed tags so it's hard to find them.
Is it possible in javascript/HTML to view last results?
I've been in the same situation many times, wishing to see what I just saw but the internet has changed out from under me. (It actually happened while I was researching this answer...) Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1309/
Let's talk a little about what this question is actually asking? The example given in this question is this very site, SO. But the purpose can apply to any website with dynamic information. As a user browses through information, an often used pattern is to link into more specific details. When the user moves back to the general list, it sometimes occurs that new information has been added, or old information removed, or just generally moved about. In those cases, it can be difficult for the user to navigate back to information they may have wanted to look at or they have looked at but now lost the link to. We ask what can be done to make this UX better both in the user habits and the website design.
I think this question truly does apply to both meta and non-meta, since there are many aspects: what can SO specifically do, as website, to improve their UX (the meta question); what could developers of sites do in general to improve UX in this regard; and what can user do to better utilize their technology or improve their workflow to improve their UX without special consideration from a website. Let's talk about what the user can do first.
In some senses, this should be a simple task. All the browser would need to do is keep a record of the current DOM in it's cache when moving to a new page, then on back press, load the cached DOM as it stood when you last looked at it. But what do browsers actually do?
Browsers won't consistently help you right now by default. The answer by Stephan P gives us some insight. Essentially, going 'back' could result in a number of different things from loading the cached resources like I described above, to reloading some of the resources, to just refetching everything. And this is all decided by the arcane machinations of your browser. You have basically no say in what happens. (Except of course when you use one of the many methods to forcibly skip cache and reload all the recourses, but there doesn't seem to by any method to forcibly load from cache). So, no dice there.
The closest browser functionality I was able to find is the setting to load from cache when offline in Chrome. But this would require us to constantly switch between connecting and disconnecting from the internet while browsing. Which is not very helpful.
The above point actually just proves that this should be 100% possible,
if we could just look at our browser's cache of the page. Which we can! GolfWolf lets us know about the handy chrome://cache address that let's us view the complete contents of our browser's cache! Unfortunately, it is all in hex, so not super useful for browsing...
There are tools that will convert the hex dump to a viewable webpage as Senseful points us to. But I think, going into your cache, finding the old page, copying hex over to a translater, then viewing your page is not a very friendly workflow for regular browsing.
So, our browser is basically useless for what we are trying to accomplish. We only have a few options:
Something very custom...
A. One potential would be to set up a proxy of sorts, that hard caches all the pages that went through it and returns from cache when you went back in your browser. Perhaps a simple browser extension button to click to send a message to the proxy to clear its cache?
B. While we're talking about crazy ideas... It could be possible to make a webpage that loads pages in iframes and attempts to intercept link clicks and instead of opening in the same iframe opens a new iframe to the new page and just hides the old iframe in its previous state, so when you go 'back' it just unhides your old page. But that is super cludgy and will break a lot of stuff with all those discontinuities. (and don't forget, not all links open a new page, there's a lot of ways this plan could go wrong).
Outside of actually solving this, what could we do to mitigate or work around our problems? ...Never leave a webpage... ever...
In all seriousness, this is my workflow: open the main page, open all links in new tabs (You can usually cmd/ctrl-click to quickly open a link in a new tab), keep all the tabs open until I've finished.
Several things. There are many strategies that can be used to make information traversable, and they all have their own benefits and ramifications. This is not an exhaustive list:
The site can implement custom urls with parameters for everything that could affect rendering of information. Google search does this. In this way going back to a link (or just sharing a link to a different person) will result in loading the page in the same deterministic way as before. This can be used to great success, but also can result in inordinately long links.
The site can use cookies or local storage to keep track of where you are to restore your state when you return to a previous page.
The site can create its own history for you to browse. This is similar to what SO does now in other aspects, but taken to the extreme. Basically, record every action, every comment, every view, every post, absolutely everything. Then let the user browse through this history of things (obviously with lots of sorting and filtering options) to let them sift down to what they are looking for. i.e. "What was that post I was looking at yesterday? ...searching... Oh here it is!"
Each of these are huge topics on their own. Way outside scope of an answer here on SO.
TL;DR