Pluginweb.Net

As the title asks, will IE8 & HTML5 make Really Simple History (and other Ajax history managers) irrelevant? Not so much says Brian Dillard, project lead for the Really Simple History project. While additions to HTML 5 & IE8 will definitely make managing page history easier, Brian anticipates that libraries such as RSH will evolve into tools for handling session data, especially as offline storage tools mature:

Other browsers will still require polling and other browser-specific hacks. Even after all browsers support the hashchange event and all non-supporting browsers fade into obscurity, Ajax history management will still play a role. For one thing, we’ll still need a mechanism for our Ajax apps to associate state information with a given hash value (assuming, of course, that the hash token itself doesn’t contain all the state information you need).

Right now, RSH accomplishes this with a hidden textarea. In the future, though, offline storage mechanisms will probably play the textarea’s role. Once we get to the point where offline storage and the hashchange event are universal standards, Ajax history management will morph from a collection of hacks to a collection of convenience methods for native browser capabilities. Let’s hope that time is sooner rather than later.

His thought seem to be on target and I think that apart from handling state information, RSH will eventually fill the holes that hashchange leaves behind.