Hashbangs (#!) has been around the web for a while now since Twitter started using it for Ajax page loads. I was rather annoyed by the unnecessary page refreshes from time to time. But noooow...Twitter is finally starting to move away from hashbangs! I remember talking to the front-end engineer at Twitter a few months ago at their San Francisco headquarter with it and asked them why they did it. It was when I was working on the menu's for SleepBot. After I came back to New York, I wanted to implement it for SleepBot. However, it turned out that it is not that simple to parse out the URL's hashbang after all and press was there for us to release it on time.

So I ended up using History.js, a Javascript wrapper for HTML5 history management: on the links that uses ajax load, we bind the click with the following if statement:

if(History.enabled){
//Do the ajax load, and then use History.pushState(....) to update the url
}else{
//IE users, I'm sorry, you are getting a cold refresh.
}

This worked at first, however, as the project grows, problem happens with Ajax load: bindings stopped working! It was caused by my lack of understanding for jQuery's bind live and delegate functions. If you are serious about web development using jQuery, that is a must read.