Buy Pokémon cards

Concept — not built

Remembering filters when you leave this page

The problem: tick Base Set, Holo and Vintage, click through to Card Shows, come back — and the grid is unfiltered again. All that work is gone. Right now this page only remembers cards-per-row and whether the rail is open.

Option 1 — put the filters in the URL

The address becomes something like tcg-market.html?set=Base+Set&holo=Holo&q=pichu, rewritten quietly each time a box is ticked.

• Back button just works — leave for Card Shows, press Back, filters are still there.
• A filtered view becomes shareable: link “all our Base Set holos” in a post or an email.
• Survives a refresh, and can be bookmarked.
• Nothing hidden — what you see is in the address bar.

• Forgotten as soon as the tab closes — no help to someone returning next week.
• URLs get long and untidy with a lot of filters on.
• Must use replaceState, not pushState — otherwise every tick is a history entry and Back needs pressing fifteen times to escape.

Option 2 — save them in the browser (localStorage)

The same trick already used for the cards-per-row buttons.

• Survives closing the browser entirely — filters are still set days later.
• Keeps the address bar clean.

• Invisible state: landing on a filtered grid with no idea why is confusing, and looks like “where have all the cards gone?”
• Does nothing for sharing or bookmarking.
• Doesn’t transfer between phone and desktop.

Suggested: the URL, because it fixes the actual problem — leaving the page and coming back. localStorage can be layered on later for returning visitors. Build cost is small either way: all the filter state already lives in one object, and every change funnels through one function, so the save hook goes in a single place.

Related decision: whether Card Shows should force a new tab. Recommendation was no — it’s a main nav item on all seven pages, forcing a new tab breaks the Back button and feels broken on phones, and anyone who wants one can ctrl-click. Fix the filter memory instead and leaving the page costs nothing.