Navigation API #435

Description

The Navigation API was previously submitted for consideration in Interop 2023.

Since then it has matured, graduated from being a HTML Spec PR to a part of the spec and landed in Chrome 110 (~ February 7th 2023, plus other Chromium-based browsers since).

Please note that I do not represent an implementer. I am a web developer that is enthusiastic about this massive improvement over the History API.

Some excellent features include:

• The navigate event: a powerful way to conditionally convert cross-document navigations to same-document navigations
• entries: exposing a list of NavigationHistoryEntry as an abstraction over same-origin session history entries
• Focus reset and scroll behaviour
• Handling a 'traverse' navigation event is much more intuitive than a popstate. You can avoid reacting to it, derive whether the direction was forward or backwards by comparing entry index, and much more.

Specification

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/nav-history-apis.html#navigation-api

Open Issues

• Will the current transitionWhile() design of updating the URL/history entry immediately meet web developer needs? WICG/navigation-api#66
• Event property to access the element who triggered a navigation WICG/navigation-api#225

Tests

https://wpt.fyi/results/navigation-api

Current Implementations

• Blink
• Gecko
• WebKit

Standards Positions

• Navigation API mozilla/standards-positions#543
• Navigation API WebKit/standards-positions#34
• Blink Intent to Ship (April 2022)

Browser bug reports

• Blink implementation (closed)
• Gecko implementation (pending)
• Webkit implementation (pending)

Developer discussions

Various, including:

• Support the Navigation API vuejs/router#1415

Polls & Surveys

• Came 7th in Results of MDN APIs & JavaScript survey #246 after being selected by ~18% of participants
• (Has there been a survey since?)
• This issue has a relatively large amount of '👍' reactions

Existing Usage

No response

Workarounds

• virtualstate/navigation (partial) polyfill

Accessibility Impact

No response

Privacy Impact

• https://github.com/WICG/navigation-api/blob/main/security-privacy-questionnaire.md

Other

TAG design reviews:

• App history API w3ctag/design-reviews#605
• Navigation API (formerly app history API) w3ctag/design-reviews#717

MDN documentation