Interaction-Safe State for the Web

Jay McCarthy, Shriram Krishnamurthi

Scheme and Functional Programming, 2006

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated that continuations provide a clean basis to describe interactive Web programs. This account, however, provides only a limited description of state, which is essential to Web applications. This state is affected by the numerous control operators (known as navigation buttons) in Web browsers, which make Web applications behave in unexpected and even erroneous ways. We describe these subtleties as discovered in the context of working Web applications. Based on this analysis we present linguistic extensions that accurately capture state in the context of the Web, presenting a novel form of dynamic scope. We support this investigation with a formal semantics and a discussion of applications. The results of this paper have already been successfully applied to working applications.

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