The navigation API

[domenic]

Description

This proposal is about getting interop on the navigation API, which provides a much cleaner model for history and navigation and some new capabilities developers have requested. (This spec is currently in the WICG, but will be merged into the HTML Standard in October.)

Rationale

Navigation and history has historically been a large pain for developers; see some of the discussion in #199. The navigation API solves many of these issues by its design. Quantitatively, it has second-most of any WICG proposal to date.

Specification

All contents of https://wicg.github.io/navigation-api/, which will be part of HTML's "Loading web pages" section in October.

Tests

navigation-api/ (this will be moved into html/browsers/ in ~October)

Important note: wpt.fyi is especially fragile for these sorts of tests, often giving incorrect failures. (I.e., failures that don't match what a user sees by loading the corresponding test in the browser on wpt.live.) See web-platform-tests/wpt#33590. Fixing this would probably need to be a priority for the wpt.fyi infrastructure team, to make this project feasible.

[tbondwilkinson]

The Navigation API is P2 for Google's closure library.

"We have a goog.history API that could probably be simplified or obviated entirely. This is also a point of confusion for many developers."

[gsnedders]

All contents of https://wicg.github.io/navigation-api/, which will be part of HTML's "Loading web pages" section in October.

It is now November, and I still can't see any issue or PR referencing this.

[domenic]

Apologies, we're running a week or so behind schedule! My understanding was that the true deadline was December 31, 2022, but we're working as fast as we can to be done well in advance of that.

[foolip]

This case is similar to #235 (comment), where I suggested that people can express conditional support. The proposal selection period is during November, and Nov 17 is our deadline for positions, so you can think of that as a deadline for when folks will want confidence that any outstanding spec and test work is going to be done.

It's still an individual judgement, so if there's anyone who's on the fence, spelling out here what you're looking for would be very helpful.

[gsnedders]

Yeah, there's no hard deadline, but having some issue tracking it to easily check on the status would be nice!

[tbondwilkinson]

Navigation API is P1 for Google's internal web framework

"Reduce gaps in existing History API, significantly simplify internal framework code for navigation, new browser features and behavior for navigations."

[foolip]

In the MDN short survey on APIs & JavaScript, "Navigation API (window.navigation)" was selected by ~18% of survey takers, putting it in the middle third of options. (There is some uncertainty as with any survey data.)

[domenic]

Regarding spec status, I've put up what I've got so far at whatwg/html#8502 for people to track. I'm hopeful it'll be done by the end of the week, although reviews will probably take a bit longer.

Please let me know if there's anything I can help with to shore up confidence. The spec at https://wicg.github.io/navigation-api/ is quite complete, so moving it over to HTML is mostly mechanical plus taking the opportunity to do a bit of self-review and fix minor bugs. (E.g. I accidentally named two variables the same thing in one algorithm in the original spec, but caught that and fixed it when doing the port.) I'm hopeful that it's clear we're on the standards track and have a solid spec people can work from.