Soft Navigations

[yoavweiss]

WebKittens

No response

Title of the spec

Soft Navigations

URL to the spec

https://wicg.github.io/soft-navigations

URL to the spec's repository

https://github.com/WICG/soft-navigations

Issue Tracker URL

No response

Explainer URL

No response

TAG Design Review URL

w3ctag/design-reviews#879

Mozilla standards-positions issue URL

mozilla/standards-positions#854

WebKit Bugzilla URL

No response

Radar URL

No response

Description

“Soft navigations” are JS-driven same-document navigations that are using the history API or the new Navigation API, triggered by a user gesture and modifies the DOM, modifying the previous content, as well as the URL displayed to the user.

w3c/performance-timeline#168 outlines the desire to be able to better report performance metrics on soft navigations. Heuristics for detecting soft navigations can measure their SPA’s performance metrics, and optimize them to benefit their users.

The feature relies on infrastructure for Task Attribution. It's currently defined in the same spec as this feature, but could be considered separately in the future (if more features use it). It also has some overlap with a TC39 proposal called AsyncContext.

Beyond that, the feature's usability relies on w3c/performance-timeline#192, which is currently a WIP.

Past discussions:
Soft navigation discussion
Task attribution discussion