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If I make a typo and get a 200 for some url that doesn't actually exist, my browser will now happily suggest that url when I'm typing something in the future.

Is there a benefit for doing so?

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It's not a benefit but a side effect of client side routing

If your main routing logic is in your JS app your server can't know if a route exists or not unless you duplicate routing code across front end and backend

Well client side routing is fundamentally broken unless you do serve a 200 and the index

You only have to serve a 200 and the index for valid routes to have frontend routing working.

The complaint is serving a 200 for invalid routes, which breaks all kinds of things and violates web standards.

Indeed, for a cost-effective approach with a static host, why not generate placeholder HTML files for all valid routes at compile time? Alternatively, using Astro or a similar tool would be a wise choice :)

This isn’t really feasible, think about how dynamic routes can be? Can you generate a route for every ID of a thing?

I have actually seen this approach for SSG. You define a function to get all IDs, then the framework renders all of the pages using those.

Well you could plausibly do this with nano-web, simply disable SPA_MODE and generate your routes in this manner.

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