User hits back button - has to enter form values from scratch

[gimme_this_gimme_that]

I have a JSP that renders a XHTML formatted page.

The user clicks a button (not a submit) that calls a validate
JavaScript function that submits the form.

The user clicks and goes to a confirmation page - also in XHTML.

When the user clicks the back button to edit his entries (say he's
made a mistake) - the form is cleared - automajically - and the user
has to enter all the data from scratch.

Is there a way to tell the browser to cache the data in the form so
the user can edit just the controls that require editing?

BTW, even when I create a Java POJO and populate it with data from the
form - and populate the back-button form from a request-object POJO -
the page is still cleared - and the user has to restart. That is, the
server side solution isn't working for me either.

Once I got lucky and got the form to cache using strict XHTML - but
that solution turned out to be intermittent. Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn't.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.