Not sure if I really understand what are you trying to achieve.
But suppose you have a table of records and want to open a new window with the details of the record when you click on one of it.
In JSF to get the selected row, you need to submit the page to the server, so you need to open the new page when the page comes back (and the backing bean has the actual row). So you can use the "onLoad" Javascript function of the form, something like (with some simplifications):
If you update something in the details page, you need to update the main page *after* submitting the detail page. Easy again if you use the onLoad:
It has some simplifications (I don't remember the specific details), but it works... I've used it
[ August 15, 2007: Message edited by: Gabriel Claramunt ]