If you go on a Web site and do a few clicks, where you will obtain a few pages, you can usually click the browser's back button to go back up to a certain number of pages and obtain them immediately. This is because the browser caches those pages and, unless specified otherwise, they are usually available for a certain period of time.

Today's Web application are as mentioned "applications". So, we try to make them look like a Microsoft Office application, for example, such as Outlook or any other application environment which will provide toolbar, navigation pane and so on. In most of those Web sites, there will be transactional operations which will be executed in the background, from time to time, so to provide users with dynamic application changes so as we have here on the Universal Thread. When this is the case, a hit is sent to the server which has been initiated automatically and not by the user. However, those hits gets added to the chain of URLs in the cache. Thus, sometimes, the user can click the back button and obtain nothing because the previous hit was in fact sent in the background and wouldn't affect anything visually.

All this is good but users having the use of clicking on the back button may sometimes wonder why the back button doesn't work. It does work but the user thinks it's not because it sends back a transaction operation and not the last hit the user has done. While we still have users going backword, where I believe on a Web site we should always go forward, would there be a way to avoid certain hits to be cached?