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Comment by azov | Hacker News Reader

The article does not mention the main problem with this approach: you're breaking the hypertext model of the web. All of a sudden your pages don't have URL's, you can't bookmark them, back and forward buttons in your browser don't work, page source does not reflect your document structure, etc. There are some cases when all this is not important, but in many, many cases I want my webpage to be just that - a webpage.

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Not really. Frameworks, like the mentioned Backbone, let you maintain links to all important functionality - http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Router

You probably have to worry about hypertext in content websites (search engine indexable) but for rich web apps, pure JS UI seems to be a good option. GMail's hypertext is totally messy.

As for urls and bookmarking, HTML5 history api can help (Github source navigation)

You can make back and forward work by changing the url hash, and if you poll the hash and adjust the content accordingly, you can make unique urls work as well.

I think most javascript frameworks make this pretty easy, I am most familiar with Backbone's Router (recently renamed from Controller)

See: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Router

In the future, the HTML5 history API should make this even simpler. People definitely do screw this up though.. I don't think the recent Gawker/Gizmodo redesign did this initially, and it seemed like that was one of the reasons people really hated it.

I would argue that the hypertext idea isn't relevant for an app (sorry Tim Berners-Lee). At least not as relevant as for e.g. a blog. Maybe we should talk about the hyperapp model..

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