difference in history between IE and Moz - using iframes

sfullman

If there is a better place to post this, PLEASE let me know. Thanks!

OK, this is not hard to understand but a solution is out of my league.

I have page1.php with an <iframe name="posttarget"> at the bottom which is inside a <div> tag set to style="display:none;" - so the iframe is "hidden".

A form on page1.php, with target="posttarget" (which is the hidden iframe), will post data to the iframe. A lot of this is "Web 2.0" style stuff where the returned content in the iframe will be a script like this:

<script>
window.parent.doSomeAction(); //this will dynamically change page content w/o refreshing the page
</script>

However, in a succession of forms, an application, we have this:
1. form 1 on page1.php posts to the iframe
2. iframe processes post, returns <script>window.parent.location='page2.php';</script>
3. form 2 on page2.php posts to the iframe
4. iframe processes post, returns <script>window.parent.location='page3.php';</script>
5. form 3 on page3.php posts to the iframe
6. etc. etc.

HERE IS THE PROBLEM:

in IE (all flavors), when I'm in page 3 and click back, it takes me to page 2, then to page 1 - the iframe is not added into the history. In other words IE sees 3 pages in my history.

this happens to be what I want, though it's maybe not "strict" html interpretation, I don't know

However, Firefox adds the iframe response into history (seeing 5 pages), so that when I push "back" in Firefox, the iframe page loads with the redirect, and this kicks me back to page 3 again.

BOTTOM LINE:

Any way to set headers so as to exclude a page from history? Is there a universally recognized way to do this? Excuse my not knowing this, I'm a PHP person but not that good with header rules and browser differences.

Samuel

NogDog

To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to remove a page from the browser history once it's in there. The only thing I know of is to use the Javascript windlow.location.replace('newpage.php') function, in which case newpage.php would replace the current page without placing the current page into the browser's history. (And of course, if this is to be generally accessible on the WWW, then you need a fall-back mechanism for browsers without JS enabled, realizing that they'll still have all the pages in history, then.)