Some time ago I was programming when I realized the amount of information being habitually processed by me might actually be interesting to someone not in the pogramming scene. I wrote down a few seconds of thought, so enjoy 8-)

The sorts of things that go on in a Computer Programmers Mind:

"Last night I was asked to make the Back and Forward Browser Buttons work within the LEAP Software. Normally you would think this would be easy since the History Object in IE has the back() and forward() functions. Unfortunately it didn't turn out quite that simple.

Since the History Object is treated with a high level of security, its impossible to extract any information from it, including the current documents index within the browsers history. That is to say we have no way of determining what page we are currently on via a history index.

To compound this problem further, it was brought to my attention that nested IFRAMES "latch on" to their parent frames history object. To explain further, if you have an iframe and your scrolling back along the history of its previous pages, when that iframe runs out of previous pages, it will start hitting up previous pages from its parent frame! This is an obvious problem since the content area we want to control specifically for LEAP is inside an IFRAME.

A couple things I should point out here are that the Back and Forward buttons need to dynamically Enable and Disable themselves…. But how can this be done if we don't know the current index within our page history?

One suggestion was made to create a pseudo history object, but in so far as I can tell this would require some modifications to the pages being edited, most specifically the Onload Event, and frankly it just makes me cringe…. I thought about some sort of indexing system, but it seemed to reach a dead-end around 4am this morning.

So what now?"