All of this stuff needs to be stored on the server anyway… otherwise how will you get it back on the page when I switch computers or pull it up on my phone.
You say all of that needs to be stored in the server?
That is how you make a big server crawl with just 100 users, regardless of the programming language of the backend.
Even mobile browsers handle this just fine: https://share.icloud.com/photos/022RMgNZWot7w6AXurHPKC_Nw
This is a myth, servers and round trips can be way faster than most people seem to believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K71AyAF6E4#t=21m21s
That's thousands of DOM updates per second being sent and rendered at 144fps.
Some will manually push a History entry, but not all
Also you don't want that store server side because there can be multiple parallel tabs and you don't get notified server side when the tab is closed to properly cleanup the associated resources.
?tab[0]=/some/url&tab[1]=/some/resource&activeTab=0
Bam, you have tabs in the url. I can duplicate the tab, share my view, or whatever. Assuming the other user/tab/window/profile has access to these resources, it’ll show exactly the same thing. I can even bookmark it!
You can even add popups:
?popupModal=saveorleave
This state probably won’t be applied on an entry, but what’s great is that pushing [back] in the browser is the same effect as cancel! If you click “leave” then you do a “replace state” instead of a “push state” navigation, so the user doesn’t go back to a modal…
This was, at one point, decently standard logic. Then people who don’t know how browsers work started creating frameworks and reinventing things.
I digress. I’m just so glad I left the front end 15 years ago, I’d lose my shit if I were dealing with this kind of stuff every day.