如何在不影响浏览器历史记录的情况下实现导航？

Question

If you go here: http://twitter.com/account/resend_password

Then click on "Send Instructions" without filling in the form, it appears to be doing a full, non-ajax request.

However, if I look at my browser history, the previous page (resend_password) isn't in the history. It's as if it made an ajax request.

What is twitter doing? Is this really just an ajax request, or is it doing something tricky?

Answer 1

window.location.replace will load a page but won't save it in the history.

window.location.replace('http://twitter.com/account/resend_password');

Answer 2

This is not an ajax request.

It is not something tricky either.

Twitter is only answering the HTTP POST request with an HTTP response code number 302 (Moved Temporarily) - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#3xx_Redirection . The browser answers as if it was an HTTP response code number 303 (See Other).

In fact, what happens is merely a redirection to the same page .

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Edit : added code for testing purposes.

I have just tested with the following code, and it confirms what is said above:

<form method="post"><input type="submit" value="click here" /></form>
<?php
if ( $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST' )
    header( 'Location: /test.php', true, 302 );
?>

I am using PHP as the server-side language. I saved this script as test.php in the webserver public root folder. It behaves exactly as the Twitter page: clicking the form submit button, the 302 redirection is triggered by using the header function. The browser history does not change.