Don't decode paths in locations (keep the browser-native value)

[jacobwgillespie]

Hey, I'm really excited about Navi and the potential to replace React Router with it in one of our apps. This is a feature request, and I'm not sure how difficult it would be given Navi's architecture and its use of the history module, but here we go:

It would be awesome if Navi could bypass history's automatic decoding of location.pathname, discussed in this issue here: remix-run/history#505.

That automatic decoding deviates from browser behavior and makes the flow of pathnames very difficult to reason about - it results in divergent behavior when navigating directly to a page via a URL vs when navigating through history with back/forward vs when clicking on a <Link>. We have worked around this by creating a custom <PageRoute> component that manually decodes path params from window.location, but it's all very hack-y.

It would be cool to just drop the entire mess and switch to Navi, however if I'm following the code correctly, I think that bug would still apply here since it's internal to history. If there's a way for Navi to either provide a workaround that doesn't depend on history for the path params, or for Navi to drop the dependency on history entirely (like Reach Router does), that would be really awesome!

[jamesknelson]

This is definitely something we can do.

In the next release, I'm hoping to remove the dependency on history (while still providing the option to pass in a history object for compatibility with react-router).

If we remove the history, we'll still need some code to handle the same tasks, but the new code can definitely address the issue you've mentioned.

If you'd like to help out, a PR that removes the History dependency by handling it all within Navi would be super helpful.

[jacobwgillespie]

Looks like history just merged remix-run/history#656, which removes the automatic decoding, about two hours ago. It's not yet released, but just FYI the next major version of history will have this behavior omitted.

[jamesknelson]

Okay. Will keep this open until the next major version of history is released, and bump Navi's version then too.